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PlainSpell

furigana

noun

furigana is a noun meaning “Kana printed next to or above a kanji or other character to indicate the pronunciation” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-U-R-I-G-A-N-A, and it appears about once in every 35 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does furigana mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Kana printed next to or above a kanji or other character to indicate the pronunciation.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is furigana?

Furigana appears about once in every 35 million words in written English, the 180,281st most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Where does furigana come from?

Borrowed from Japanese 振り仮名 (furigana, “annotating kana”, literally “assigned provisional character”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).