Similar to the ligatures were several "two-syllable Chinese characters" () created in the 19th century as Chinese characters for SI units. In Chinese these units are disyllabic and standardly written with two characters, as "centimeter" ( centi-, meter) or "kilowatt". However, in the 19th century these were often written via compound characters, pronounced disyllabically, such as for or for – some of these characters were also used in Japan, where they were pronounced with borrowed European readings instead. These have now fallen out of general use, but are occasionally seen.