Occasionally I want to look up a word on Jisho.org from a device where it is inconvenient to use a Japanese keyboard. The default is to interpret an input as romaji if possible, so that's usually not a problem, but a word like 音{おん}韻{いん} would be romanized as onin, which Jisho parses as おにん, not おんいん, and does not find the word I am looking for.

When actually entering the text, I would enter o-n-n-i-n-n, but onnin, would be the romanization of おんにん. Is there a standard way to differentiate between んい and に in situations like this?

  • Can you change which IME you're using on the device? On Windows 10, onninn gets me おんいん. – Andy Oct 10 '16 at 22:42
  • @Andy The issue is not with an IME. If I'm actually typing kana, I can render it just fine. You can see what I was looking for from the accepted answer. – Paul Oct 11 '16 at 1:33

It is not easy to input the right romaji to find a Japanese word especially when 'ん' is in the middle.

In the case of 'onin', you should place an apostrophe after the first 'n' to separate 'on' and 'in' and if you type "on'in", the jisho.org will show it as [音韻]{おんいん}.


If we go by what Japanese people use in practice, the standard way when typing into an IME is in fact exactly what you said. Double the "n" and type "onninn".

Linguists will probably frown at it, but it is what people do in practice. For instance, a Japanese mobile QWERTY keyboard with limited space will likely not even have an ' key. You sometimes even see people do the double "n" when not using an IME because they're accustomed to it, and many people never bother learning "easy to read romanization for foreigners".

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