What ﾎ means
It is the halfwidth form of katakana ホ.
JIS C 6220-1969 used narrow katakana in limited 7/8-bit Japanese computing and telecom systems. JIS X 0208 and Shift_JIS later carried double-byte text; Unicode kept these forms so conversions back could preserve them.
Separate marks make ﾎﾞ (“bo”) and ﾎﾟ (“po”). Text normalization NFKC folds ﾎ into ホ; NFC preserves the distinction. “Halfwidth” describes encoding, not guaranteed display width.
Technical or legacy: an encoding or width choice in Japanese text.
A fullwidth-only field may reject ﾎ; use ホ there.
Part of the collection
Who writes ﾎ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why did ﾎ turn into ホ?
NFKC merges compatibility forms, so ﾎ becomes ホ; NFC preserves the width distinction.
More like this
11
How to type or find ﾎ
- Also called
- halfwidth kana · hankaku · 半角カナ
- Search it as
- Shift_JIS · IME F8 · NFKC
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Windows (Word)
Windows
HTML
ﾎCSS
\FF8EWindows IME
As of 2026, in Microsoft Japanese IME, enter the kana and press F8 for halfwidth Katakana.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ﾎ
HTML hex
ﾎ
CSS content
content: "\FF8E";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EF%BE%8E
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.