Halfwidth Katakana Letter Sa

Convert サ to half-width katakana.

Enter “sa” with a Japanese input method (IME), select サ, then choose the half-width candidate. As of 2026, Microsoft IME documents F8 for this conversion; other keyboards may differ.

Use ｻ when the receiving field asks for 半角カナ; otherwise use サ.

What does ｻ mean?

It has the same Japanese reading as サ: “sa.”

Katakana began in the early ninth century as quick annotations: Buddhist scholars abbreviated Chinese-character strokes in the margins of Chinese texts to mark Japanese readings. Historical research traces サ to an abbreviation of 散; it rejects older proposed sources 薩 and 奘.

Katakana forms had spread and become more standardized by the twelfth century; Japan officially settled the modern set in 1900. The halfwidth form came with JIS X 0201, established in 1969: it let kana fit a single-byte character set, a format legacy later carried by Shift_JIS. Unicode treats ｻ as a compatibility form of サ, so its width can change in layout or normalization without changing its reading.