Hiragana 平仮名,ひらがな is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji and in some cases Latin script. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means "ordinary" or "simple" kana.

Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable in the Japanese language  is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters.