We (kana)

in , or in , is an obsolete Japanese that is normally pronounced in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with "" in was introduced to represent [ve] in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is presumed that represented , and that and indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura and Taishō periods, when they both came to be pronounced as , later shifting to the modern . Along with the kana for ( in , in ), this was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946 and replaced with and . It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia or foreign words, the katakana form (U-[small-e]) is used, as in for "west".

The still sees some modern-day usage as a stylistic variant of . Ebisu is usually written as , but sometimes like , and name of the beer , which is actually pronounced "Ebisu". The Japanese title of the Rebuild of Evangelion series is . VTuber Sakamata Chloe (沙花叉クロヱ) of Hololive Production uses Katakana ヱ (we) in place of the pronounced エ (e). is sometimes written with a , , to represent a sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this, and the digraph is far more common. The Meiji-era Classical Japanese version of the Bible renders Jehovah as (Yehoba), and (ye) is also used to transcribe any Hebrew name spelled with Je in English (pronounced "ye" in Hebrew, though), such as ; the modern Japanese version, on the other hand, only uses (e), hence (Ehoba) and (Efuta).

is still used in several Okinawan orthographies for the mora . In the Ryūkyū University system, is also combined with a small (), to represent the sound . is used in Ainu for .

In wāpuro rōmaji—that is, the string of letters used for input to produce ゑ or ヱ—the sequence is wye.

Stroke order

File:Oldsign-withwehiragana-tokyo-2015jan25.jpg

Sign in Tokyo reading (Webisu...) in hiragana

File:Katakana letter We on a curtain sign - Shinjuku - 2024 Feb 13.jpeg

Curtain sign in Tokyo reading (Yawegaki) in katakana

Stroke order of both and

Animated	Diagram
Animated GIF showing the stroke order. The character is drawn similarly to the Arabic numeral '3', before a small loop is formed at the base of the character, and a small, squashed and italicised 'm' is drawn below as a base. Stroke order in writing	Diagram showing the stroke order of the character: on the left, the finished character; on the right, a grayed-out version with small red arrows showing the stroke order, with a green dot showing the beginning point of the stroke. Stroke order in writing
Animated GIF showing the stroke order. The character begins with a stroke resembling a squashed version of the Arabic numeral '7', before a separate vertical line is drawn separately beneath it, and a horizontal line forming the base of the character drawn below it, attached. Stroke order in writing	Diagram showing the stroke order of the character: on the left, the finished character; on the right, a grayed-out version with small red arrows showing the stroke order, with green dots showing the beginning points of each stroke. Stroke order in writing

The is made with one stroke. It resembles a that continues with a double-humped shape underneath.

The is made with three strokes:

1. A horizontal line that hooks down and to the left.
2. A vertical line, just grazing the end of the first stroke.
3. A long horizontal line across the bottom.

Other communicative representations

• Full Braille representation

ゑ / ヱ in Japanese Braille
ゑ / ヱ we	ヹ ve	ゑい / ヱー wē/wei	ヹー vē/vei
Template:Braille cell	Template:Braille cell	Template:Braille cell	Template:Braille cell

• Computer encodings

See also

• U (kana)
• E (kana)