WO

Wo may refer to:

WO also refer to:

WO may be an acronym for:

Wo (kana)

を, in hiragana, or ヲ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represent one mora.

Modern usage

In Japanese, this kana is used almost exclusively for a particle; therefore, the katakana form (ヲ) is fairly uncommon in everyday language — mostly used as a stand-in for its hiragana counterpart in texts that need to be written entirely in katakana.

Generally, it represents [o], although some dialects retain the pronunciation [wo], which is also often used in songs. It is also occasionally pronounced this way when stressing the particle, especially to clarify when someone misunderstands what has been said. It is transliterated variably as ⟨o⟩ or ⟨wo⟩, with the former being faithful to standard pronunciation but the latter avoiding confusion with お and オ. Katakana ヲ can sometimes be combined with a dakuten, ヺ, to represent a /vo/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to do this. The combination ヴォ is used far more frequently to represent the /vo/ sound.

Wa (Japan)

Japanese Wa (倭, "Japan, Japanese", from Chinese 倭 Wō) is the oldest recorded name of Japan. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato "Japan" with the Chinese character 倭 until the 8th century, when the Japanese replaced it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance."

Historical references

The earliest textual references to Japan are in Chinese classic texts. Within the official Chinese dynastic Twenty-Four Histories, Japan is mentioned among the so-called Dongyi 東夷 "Eastern Barbarians". Note that the following texts are chronologically ordered by date of compilation, which does not always correspond with the sequence of Dynasties in Chinese history. In traditional Chinese units of measurement, distance is recorded in lǐ 里, which varied among dynastic standards, roughly equivalent to 300–400 meters. Tsunoda (1951:4) cautions that great distances in thousands of lǐ "are, of course, not to be taken literally."

The historian Wang Zhenping summarizes Wo contacts with the Han State.