He (kana)

へ, in hiragana, or ヘ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which represents one mora. The [he] sound is the only sound that is written identically in hiragana and katakana and therefore confusable according to the Unicode Standard. In the Sakhalin dialect of the Ainu language, ヘ can be written as small ㇸ to represent a final [h] after an [e] sound (エㇸ [eh]).

It is usually pronounced [he] with the aspirate [h] before its vowel. It is also often used as a grammatical particle indicating direction, which makes only the vowel sound [e].

Though the two forms へ and ヘ are usually rendered with a small difference between them, in order to match better with the appearance of other hiragana or katakana characters, they can often be rendered identically. A reader is not expected to distinguish one from the other without contextual clues.

Stroke order

The stroke order is identical between hiragana and katakana.

Other communicative representations

• Full Braille representation

• Computer encodings

See Also

• Japanese particles: へ

References