What ｷ means
Microsoft Japanese IME's F8 key does this as of 2026-10-03.
With romaji input enabled, type ki to form the Japanese syllable; half-width conversion changes the current composition to ｷ.
JIS C 6220-1969 (later called JIS X 0201) put katakana in one-byte codes for early Japanese computing and telecommunications. A byte is a small unit of computer storage; limited code space could not hold the full writing system, and katakana was the main Japanese script in those systems. Later two-byte standards added hiragana and kanji.
Unicode preserves ｷ as a compatibility form of キ. Its half-width classification does not fix its displayed width: fonts and layout determine the drawn size. NFKC compatibility normalization maps it to キ, erasing the width distinction.
Use ｷ when a text format asks for half-width katakana; ordinary Japanese text uses キ.
Part of the collection
Who writes ｷ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ｷ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
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How to type or find ｷ
- Search it as
- hankaku · 半角カナ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ｷ\FF77Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.