Halfwidth Katakana Small A

It is the halfwidth form of small katakana ァ.

After another kana, small ァ helps represent a sound such as “fa” in ファ; the halfwidth spelling is ﾌｧ. Alone, ｧ is not the ordinary vowel ア.

Katakana developed from shortened Chinese-character strokes that Buddhist scholars used to annotate Chinese texts in the early 9th-century. Its forms were standardized by the 12th century. Much later, 1969's JIS X 0201 standard assigned code positions for halfwidth-era kana. The standard specified code positions, not display width; the narrow display convention carried through later Japanese encodings and Unicode compatibility forms.

When should I use halfwidth katakana?

Use it when the destination asks for halfwidth kana.

As of 2026, halfwidth kana remains in some fixed-width and legacy data, including certain transaction and name-entry fields. Ordinary Japanese prose generally uses fullwidth kana; a field may reject or rewrite the wrong width.

The kana's sound role stayed the same; the narrow form first served character-cell constraints and now also supports compatibility with existing data.

How do I type ｧ?

Enter small ぁ, then convert it to halfwidth katakana.

With a Japanese IME, type xa for small ぁ; la works in some Windows settings. Convert the result to katakana, then select halfwidth katakana. Microsoft Japanese IME documentation from 2026 lists F8 for converting the current input to halfwidth katakana.

NFKC normalization changes ｧ to ァ. Use that normalization for compatibility matching only when preserving the exact halfwidth character is not required.