furigana ふりがな

In Japanese, furigana 振り仮名 is a text written next to a certain character, word, or phrase, that shows how you're supposed to read it.

For example: 振り仮名（ふりがな） shows the word furigana 振り仮名, spelled with kanji, and, inside parentheses, how to read it: fu-ri-ga-na ふりがな, spelled with hiragana 平仮名.

• Explanation
• Usage
  
  • Young Readers
  • Unusual Words
  • Words Often Written With Kana
  • Names of Animals
  • Names of People and Stuff
  • Ambiguous Written Words
  • Non-Japanese Words
• Unhelpful Furigana
  
  • Synonyms in the Furigana
  • Katakana in the Furigana
  • Foreign Words in the Furigana
  • Kanji in the Furigana
• Meaning of the Word

Explanation

The furigana may be a very confusing concept at first, because, after all: why does it even exist? Are you telling me that Japanese people can't read Japanese, and they need a reading aid to read the text, but they can read the Japanese of the reading aid? Because that sounds absolutely stupid.

But yeah, that's exactly how it works.

Japanese has multiple "alphabets." The hiragana, the katakana, and the kanji. The first two, collectively called the kana, contain every possible sound of the modern Japanese language.

Basically, anything you can say in Japanese can be spelled with hiragana. But there are reasons for it to be spelled in a different way. Like the fact Japanese doesn't really use spaces, so you end up depending on how a word is spelled to tell where a word ends and where the next one starts.

Most nouns, for example, are spelled with kanji. Verbs and adjectives are a mix of kanji and kana (okurigana). And this "kanji" is the problem.

Usage

The main use of furigana is to spell with kana the reading of the kanji. Although this sounds pretty straightforward, there are actually various reasons why this can happen.

Ignorant Young Readers

The first reason is so that young readers are able to read the kanji.

There's a total of 50 base hiragana. That's a almost twice our 26 letter Latin alphabet, but okay. There's a katakana for each hiragana which has exact the same sound, bringing to a total of 100 characters. That's a lot. Then there's 2000 kanji.

Yep. 2000 kanji. And that's just the jouyou kanji 常用漢字, officially taught in school. There are actually even more than that, but they aren't used as frequently in modern Japanese.

As you might expect, it takes quite a while to memorize 2000 kanji. You're supposed to learn them by the time you're around 15 years old, by the way. It's just a few kanji per week, every week of your life.

1000 kanji are officially taught within the 3 years of middle school. That means you can have a 13 year old who knows a lot of kanji, but will come across something he can't read from time to time.

Consequently, stuff made for children contains reading aids.

This includes shounen and shoujo manga, which contains an absurd amount of furigana written beside each and every kanji. (think of it, they're writing the whole text twice!)

As you can see above, manga full of furigana, such as Yotsubato! よつばと!, are great for people learning Japanese since they contain the readings of practically all the kanji. This way, even if you don't know a word, you'll know how to read it, which is half-way there.

(there's a list of manga that have furigana in case you need to know which manga you should try to read)

Unusual Words

Another case for furigana usage is when a word is considered unusual or rare and the reader can't be assumed to know how to read it. This sounds exactly like what happens with children, except now we're talking about works targeted at teens and older audiences.

You'll see that the older the audience is assumed to be, the fewer furigana there are. Someone in their teens can be assumed to know how to read the word "rice," kome 米, so we won't be wasting ink writing its furigana every time. This way, common, everyday words may not have furigana at all in works targeted at teens.

For works targeted at adults the same thing happens. You'll be assumed to know to read more complex words and only those extremely rare words which you have found maybe 3 times the whole year will still have furigana.

Words Often Written With Kana

Contradicting the above, there are cases some very common, basic words will have furigana alongside their kanji. This happens when the word is often written with hiragana only, never with the kanji, so everyone knows what it means but nobody knows the kanji for the word.

Above, Steins;Gate uses furigana for the word ago 顎, which is a common word that's often written with kana and ends up needing the furigana when written with its kanji. The same thing happens with many names for body parts in Japanese.

Names of Animals

Another notable case, which is an extension of the above, are names of animals. Pretty much all names of animals in Japanese have an unique kanji or a combination of kanji that are only ever used to talk about animals.

Basically, you'll only ever see a kanji for a given animal when encountering the word for that given animal. Take 狼 for example, unless you're reading the word ookami 狼, meaning "wolf," you will probably never encounter that kanji. This contrasts with kanji such as 学 which is featured in hundreds of common words.

So pretty much except for neko 猫, inu 犬 and a few others extremely common animals, names of animals in Japanese will always either be written with kanji featuring furigana readings or be written in hiragana or katakana, because nobody can be arsed to memorize their kanji.

Names of People and Stuff

The second most common case is for showing how the written name of a person is supposed to be read. A single combination of two kanji could be read in a few ways if it's a normal word, or it could be read in hundreds of different ways if it's supposed to be a name.

Since you wouldn't want people mistaking someone's kanji-written name, a writer will always spell it out using the hiragana in the furigana space. This happens in manga aimed at children and manga not aimed at children, light novels, newspapers, etc.

There are also cases where the name of a certain thing is in katakana, but just to mess with you for stylistic reasons the author has made up a kanji way for that word to be written too.

In these cases, the kanji used have a meaning associated with the word, and the original katakana is placed on the furigana space. This practice is called gikun 義訓.

An important detail about furigana for names written with kanji is that, unlike other uses of furigana, the reading of a name usually only appears once and the next time the name appears in its kanji form there will be no furigana.

That is, if in the first page it says the character name is read justice 正義 then you better make sure you remember that because the next time it shows up there will be no furigana and you don't want to mistake it for the word seigi 正義, which means "justice," or the name masayoshi 正義, which would be the sane reading for the name.

Ambiguous Written Words

Sometimes, there's furigana in a common word because it's a homograph. That means there are multiple words that are spelled with the same kanji. For example:

• i-chi-ni-chi
  一日（いちにち）
  One day.
• tsu-i-ta-chi
  一日（ついたち）
  First day of the month.

The words ichinichi いちにち and tsuitachi ついたち mean different things, but can be both spelled as 一日. Note that, usually, you should be able to tell which one it's supposed to be even without furigana from the context of the sentence.

Non-Japanese Words

Sometimes, furigana is used to tell Japan-born Japanese-speaking readers how to read a word that isn't in Japanese. Just like how it works with kanji, the furigana beside foreign words will show that word reading, that is, how it's pronounced.

An important detail is that with kanji the furigana is usually in hiragana, just like native Japanese words are usually written with hiragana, but the furigana on foreign words is usually in katakana, just like loan-words are written in katakana but never with hiragana.

Unhelpful Furigana

What we just talked about is the furigana that matters, the one that helps you read. Unfortunately, furigana is just a secondary line of text beside the primary line of text, also called "ruby text." So, as it turns out, authors tend to write literally whatever they want in that sacred spot.

This can be a huge pain when the main text is kanji and the furigana is hiragana, but the hiragana is not the reading of the kanji. The furigana is just a totally separate thing and the reading of the kanji is nowhere to be found.

So, if you are a total beginner, you may be left wondering "since when this kanji is read like this?!" Only to find out later it's because Japanese hates you and will do everything it can do make your Japanese-learning experience as miserable as possible.

The use cases below show furigana being used as a writing device for artistic reasons only.

Synonyms in the Furigana

The furigana can contain a different word that means the same thing as the main word. It's synonymous. When this happens, it's often because the main word means something objectively, while the furigana means the same thing in that specific context.

Above we have the situation illustrated. Notice how Noragami ノラガミ, being a manga aimed at children, has the proper readings of other words such as kon'ya 今夜 and yatsu 奴 in furigana, however fails to do that with the word byouin 病院.

Katakana in the Furigana

An extension of the above is when the synonym is written in katakana and, most likely, happens to be a foreign word.

This is a common case in stories that talk about games because things start having two words to describe them: the word used by the oblivious in-game characters and the words used by game-savvy players.

Take "World Item," for example, which becomes waarudo aitemu ワールド・アイテム when loaned to Japanese. The word waarudo ワールド can be used to say a world (of many) in a game, but it wouldn't be used by medieval fantasy characters to talk about their own world.

So, instead, the author makes them say "world-level item," sekai-kyuu aitemu 世界級アイテム, with the furigana showing the "normal" way of saying it. This way the characters don't use words which would disrupt the reader's suspension of disbelief and, simultaneously, lets them understand it's actually a game concept it's being talked about.

A similar thing often happens with chuunibyou 中二病 characters that like to use foreign words.

Foreign Words in the Furigana

Next we have cases where there's non-Japanese text in the furigana, because why not? It's not like anybody is having trouble reading this stuff, right?! By this point the author doesn't even use furigana for the kanji readings anymore, it's only to show off how mad his furigana skills are.

Two notes on the above image: first off, NPC is a word used in games worldwide, not only in English. Everyone knows what an NPC is even if they don't know English, so you can end up knowing what an NPC is, but having Non-Player Character fly over your head.

Secondly, I'm not sure people actually saw "to pop" to say "to spawn." I had to look up the English word in an English dictionary to understand the Japanese text, so Japanese gamers probably use it, that's why we see it up there.

Kanji in the Furigana

The last one, obviously, the greatest "take that, baka gaijin" the Japanese language can utter, the ultimate sacrilege against the sanctity of the holy, once all-benevolent, furigana readings, is, of course, writing kanji in the space supposed to be safe from the kanji!

I'm sure I don't need to comment on the irony of this sort of usage, but it does raise a big question: if you write kanji on the furigana side, is there a meta-furigana side a furigana for the furigana, where their readings could be written?

The answer is: probably nope.

In case you haven't noticed, furigana used artistically like this is (thankfully) restricted to works targeted to older audiences where the readings of kanji are rarely written. In fact, in the case of Overlord, for example, most of the furigana does not contain the actual readings of the kanji, containing synonyms or whatever random correlated words the author could think of instead.

Meaning of the Word

Lastly, let's talk about the meaning of the furigana 振り仮名 itself.

The gana 仮名 part is just kana 仮名. When it's used as a suffix, it changes pronunciation under certain circumstances. See the article about rendaku 連濁 for details.

Logically, the furigana must be kana then. When it's just any random text, it's called "ruby text" instead, or rubi ルビ.

The furi 振り part comes from the verb furu 振る, which means a billion of things, one of them being adding a kana to the ruby text to show the reading of a kanji word.

Yep. That's right. The verb furu 振る can mean to add the kana to the ruby text, so furigana 振り仮名 would simply be "the kana added to the ruby text."

But what about the readings then? Weren't the furigana the readings?! Actually, the kana which shows the reading of a kanji are called yomigana 読み仮名, literally "reading kana."

• kanji no yomigana wo furu
  読み仮名を振る
  To add-to-the-ruby-text the reading-kana of the kanji.

Note: furu is to add the kana, not "add" things in general. You don't add 1 + 1 using furu.