hiragana
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
8 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "hiragana", 8-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "hiragana" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "hiragana" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hiragana is aEnglishnoun. It means: The main syllabary for the Japanese language, used to represent native Japanese words, including particles, and when kanji is used, to represent verb and adjective endings. Pronounced /ˌhɪ.ɹəˈɡæ.nə/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hiragana |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˌhɪ.ɹəˈɡæ.nə/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #67,503 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hiragana is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌhɪ.ɹəˈɡæ.nə/. Corpus data places it at rank #67,503 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for hiragana in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Japanese 平(ひら)仮(が)名(な) (hiragana). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is hiragana, spelled H-I-R-A-G-A-N-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The main syllabary for the Japanese language, used to represent native Japanese words, including particles, and when kanji is used, to represent verb and adjective endings.
- 2A letter of this syllabary.
Etymology
From Japanese 平(ひら)仮(が)名(な) (hiragana).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #67,503 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: