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In modern Japanese, ateji (当て字, 宛字 or あてじ?, literally "assigned characters") primarily refers to kanji used phonetically to represent native or borrowed words, without regard to the meaning of the underlying characters. This is analogous to man'yōgana in pre-modern Japanese. The term ateji is also used for the opposite process, writing words using kanji for meaning only, without regard to the reading.


An example of the opposite process (meaning only) is 煙草 (tabako) for "tobacco", where the individual kanji respectively mean "smoke" (kemuri) and "grass/herb" (kusa) but have no phonetic relationship to the word tabako. This is also considered a kind of ateji.


Ateji today are used conventionally for certain words, such as 寿司 (sushi), though these words may be written in hiragana (especially for native words – for example, すし is also found for sushi), or katakana (especially for borrowed words), with preference depending on the particular word, context, and choice of the writer. Ateji are particularly common on traditional store signs and menus. For example, kōhī, the Japanese word for "coffee", is generally written using the katakana コーヒー, but on coffee shop signs and menus, it is often written with the ateji 珈琲. Conversely, tabako, the Japanese word for "tobacco", is generally written as たばこ or タバコ (in hiragana – despite being a loanword – or katakana), even on signs, and rarely written as the ateji 煙草.

Conversely, many characters have meanings derived from ateji usage. For example, the now-archaic ajia (亜細亜?) was formerly used to write "Asia" in kanji; the character 亜 now means "Asia" in such compounds as tōa (東亜?, East Asia), even though 亜 originally did not mean "Asia". From the written amerika (亜米利加?, America), the second character was taken, resulting in the semi-formal coinage beikoku (米国?), which literally translates to "rice country" but means "United States of America".

Phono-semantic matching[edit]

Further information: Phono-semantic matching







Related concepts[edit]

Ateji should not be confused with kun'yomi (訓読み), Japanese reading, or native reading, where a kanji is assigned the native Japanese equivalent as its reading – ateji refers to compounds (two or more characters).[clarification needed]

When a native Japanese word is written as a compound by meaning only, and this spelling is established in the language, as in otona (大人?, adult), the word is a kind of ateji (because a meaning-only compound), and is known specifically as 熟字訓 (jukujikun). Intentional improvised uses of irregular kanji spellings (instead of as spelling mistakes) are referred to as 義訓 gikun, and generally require furigana to be read properly; many jukujikun (established meaning-spellings) began life as gikun (improvised meaning-spellings). A loan-word example is reading 宿敵 shukuteki 'mortal enemy' as the English-derived word raibaru 'rival'.


Single-character loan words[edit]


In some rare cases, an individual kanji has a loan word reading – that is, a character is given a new reading by borrowing a foreign word – though most often these words are written in katakana. Notable examples include pēji (頁、ページ?, page), zero (零、ゼロ?, zero), dāsu (打、ダース?, dozen) (these three are the only widely recognized or used), botan (釦／鈕、ボタン?, from Portuguese botão), and mētoru (米、メートル?, meter) (marginally understood, used in some settings), while the rest are obscure – see list of single character loan words for more.

These are classed as kun'yomi of a single character, because the character is being used for meaning only (without the Chinese pronunciation), rather than as ateji, which is the classification used when a loan-word term is using existing sounds only (as in 天麩羅), or alternatively as a compound with meaning only (as in 煙草 – the sound タバコ cannot be broken down into readings of individual characters). In principle these could be considered as 1-character meaning-only ateji, but because the reading corresponds to a single character, these are considered readings instead. Note that ]]while kun'yomi are generally written as hiragana when writing out the word in kana instead of kanji (because native Japanese), these gairaigo "kun'yomi" are generally written as katakana (because a foreign borrowing). See single character gairaigo for further discussion.






See also[edit]

Further reading[edit]