The Hiragana block — U+3040 through U+309F, 96 codepoints — holds one of the two Japanese phonetic syllabaries (the other being Katakana at U+30A0–U+30FF). Each hiragana letter represents a single mora — a vowel, a consonant + vowel pair, or one of the special syllabic consonants ん (n) and っ (sokuon, the gemination mark). Modern Japanese text is a mixture of three scripts: Han ideographs (CJK Unified Ideographs) for content words, hiragana for grammatical inflections and native words without an assigned kanji, and katakana for foreign loanwords and emphasis. Hiragana is typically the first script Japanese children learn to read.
About this block
Hiragana developed during the Heian period (794–1185) from cursive forms of Chinese characters used purely for their sound value, a practice known as man'yōgana. As scribes — often court women, who were largely barred from formal Chinese-language education — wrote these phonetic-use kanji faster and more fluidly, the shapes simplified into the rounded, flowing letters we know today. The hiragana あ derives from the cursive form of 安 (peace); い from 以 (by means of); う from 宇 (universe). Because of its origins in women's writing, hiragana was once called onnade ("women's hand"), in contrast to the angular, Chinese-derived katakana favored by Buddhist monks for annotation. The "ordinary" or "easy" meaning of hiragana (平仮名) reflects its modern status as the everyday kana script.
The block was present in Unicode 1.0 (1991) and corresponds to the kana portion of JIS X 0208, the foundational 1978 Japanese national character standard. The hiragana letters proper occupy U+3041–U+3096. The traditional gojūon (五十音, "fifty sounds") chart arranges them in a 5-by-10 grid: あいうえお (a, i, u, e, o); かきくけこ (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko); さしすせそ (sa, shi, su, se, so); たちつてと (ta, chi, tsu, te, to); なにぬねの (na, ni, nu, ne, no); はひふへほ (ha, hi, fu, he, ho); まみむめも (ma, mi, mu, me, mo); やゆよ (ya, yu, yo, with three positions left blank in the modern set); らりるれろ (ra, ri, ru, re, ro); わを (wa, wo, with two more blanks); plus the standalone ん (n). Two further letters, ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we), are archaic and were removed from standard Japanese use in the 1946 spelling reform but kept in Unicode for historical texts.
Voicing is expressed by adding small marks. The dakuten (゛) turns voiceless consonants into their voiced counterparts: か → が (ka → ga), さ → ざ (sa → za), た → だ (ta → da), は → ば (ha → ba). The handakuten (゜) applied to the は-row produces the p-sounds: は → ぱ (ha → pa). Unicode encodes both the combining versions — U+3099 COMBINING KATAKANA-HIRAGANA VOICED SOUND MARK and U+309A COMBINING KATAKANA-HIRAGANA SEMI-VOICED SOUND MARK — and their spacing forms U+309B ゛ and U+309C ゜. In practice almost all voiced and semi-voiced hiragana are stored as precomposed characters (が is U+304C, not U+304B か + combining mark), which keeps text in NFC normalization compact. Below the main alphabet sit the small kana ゃ ゅ ょ (small ya, yu, yo) used for palatalized syllables like きゃ (kya), and the small っ U+3063, which doubles the following consonant. The block ends with the two iteration marks U+309D ゝ and U+309E ゞ, which mean "repeat the previous kana" (voiced, in the second case).
Katakana, encoded in the adjacent block, is a one-to-one phonetic counterpart of hiragana — every hiragana letter has a katakana equivalent representing the same sound. The two are not unified: they remain separate codepoints because Japanese readers treat them as distinct in function and style. Word breaks in Japanese have no spaces; the script transitions themselves (kanji → hiragana → katakana) often serve as visual cues to where one word ends and another begins.