Halfwidth Katakana Small O

It is the half-width form of small katakana ォ. It keeps the same small-vowel role. In ｳｫ, it combines with ｳ to write ウォ, a kana spelling used for the foreign sound /wo/; replacing it with larger オ changes the spelling.

This form belongs to the katakana set standardized in JIS C 6220 in 1969. Limited space in early character encodings made compact forms useful. That standard also stored dakuten and handakuten—marks that change a kana’s sound—separately from the base letter. Later JIS X 0201, Shift-JIS, and EUC carried the set forward; Unicode retains these forms for compatibility.

How do you type ｫ?

Use a Japanese IME and select half-width katakana. Enter small o as ぉ or ォ, then convert it to the half-width form. As of 2026-09-14, Microsoft's Japanese IME documentation lists F8 for this conversion.

With romaji input, xo or lo produces small ぉ. Convert it to katakana and choose the half-width candidate; ォ is the same small kana in full-width form.

Why does ｫ look narrow?

Its narrow shape reflects a character-encoding convention. Unicode gives it a compatibility mapping to full-width ォ. NFKC, a Unicode text-normalization form, can convert both to the same text; software that preserves the original characters can still distinguish ｫ from ォ.

The font determines the exact appearance, so “half-width” describes the character’s encoding and typographic role, not a fixed pixel measurement. In fixed-width or mixed Japanese-and-Latin text, the width choice can affect alignment.