Hiwa kanji

It means “finch,” usually the siskin.

鶸 is read ひわ in Japanese (hiwa: a light breath before “i,” then “wa”). Type ひわ in a Japanese input method editor (IME), a keyboard tool that converts kana to kanji, and choose 鶸 if it appears among the suggestions. The word can cover several finches; without a qualifier, it usually means the siskin.

A late-10th-century passage in The Pillow Book, a Japanese collection of observations and essays, lists ひわ among birds in kana. That records the word, not the first appearance of this exact kanji. A 2024 Taiwan Ministry of Education entry says 鶸 is absent from Shuowen, an early Chinese character dictionary, and records it in the Four Sounds Sea dictionary tradition, revised by 1208.

Why does 鶸 name a color?

鶸色 names the bird’s yellow-green shade.

The color sense appears in the 1603–04 Japanese-Portuguese dictionary tradition. A Kyoto National Museum record also shows 鶸色 as the ground color of a 19th-century kosode, a type of kimono.

Why do bird guides write ヒワ?

Katakana makes the bird name’s reading visible.

Japanese bird lists write マヒワ, カワラヒワ, and ベニヒワ in katakana beside scientific names. 鶸 is the compact kanji form. Japanese ornithological writing adopted katakana for plant and animal names in the 19th and early 20th centuries, partly because complex kanji could confuse readers.