Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ta

It represents the same Japanese /ta/ syllable as タ.

The difference is the character's width form, not its sound. A field marked 半角カナ asks for halfwidth kana; 全角カナ asks for fullwidth kana. The two instructions are not interchangeable.

Katakana grew from abbreviated Chinese-character strokes used to annotate Japanese readings of Chinese texts in the early 9th century; its forms were standardized by the 12th century. It later appeared in official documents and marked loanwords, names, technical terms, sound words, slang, and emphasis. The ordinary form タ comes from a final stroke of the older character 多.

Why is ﾀ so narrow?

It belongs to a legacy system for mixed-width Japanese text.

In 1969, JIS C 6220 introduced the code lineage now commonly called halfwidth kana. Narrow kana could fit alongside Roman letters in early one-byte systems. JIS X 0201 carried that lineage, and later Japanese encodings included both ordinary and narrow forms.

Unicode keeps both forms for round-trip compatibility with older text. ﾀ and タ are compatibility equivalents, not canonical equivalents: compatibility normalization can convert them to the same form and remove the width distinction.

Why did a form reject ﾀ?

The field may require a specific width.

A bank form that requires fullwidth kana may reject ﾀ, while another may accept either width and display it as fullwidth. As of 2026, PayPay Bank documents the first behavior, while SBI Shinsei documents the second.

Halfwidth does not guarantee an exact visual width or byte count. Fonts and layout affect how a character looks, while byte length depends on the encoding.