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In the Japanese writing system, kana ligatures (Japanese: 合略仮名, Hepburn: gōryaku-gana) are ligatures in the kana writing system, both hiragana and katakana. Kana such as koto (ヿ; from 事) and shite (𬼀; from 為) are not kana ligatures, but polysyllabic kana. Most of such ligatures and polysyllabic kanas became obsolete.
These characters were widely used until a spelling reform decreed that each sound (mora) would be represented by one (kana) character. In January 1900, the Kana Investigation Committee (仮名調査委員) passed a resolution to "limit the number of homophone kana characters to one each" and aimed to abolish hentaigana, iteration marks, long-vowel marks, jionkanazukai[ja], the characters ゐ/ヰ (wi) and ゑ/ヱ (we), as well as the ligatures and the polysyllabic kanas.[1]
Kana ligatures such as (toki), (koto), etc., were actively used in Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods. These ligatures were sometimes placed together along with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries in Japanese school textbooks.[2] Nowadays, these ligatures are obsolete and are not taught at schools anymore.[3]
讀方入門 (yomikata nyūmon), a school textbook in which (koto) and (toki) can be seen listed among the other kanas[4]
These ligatures were not represented in computer character encodings until JIS X 0213:2000 (JIS2000) added ゟ (yori) and ヿ (koto). In 2002, ヿ and ゟ were added to Unicode 3.2. In October 2009, 𪜈 (tomo) was added to Unicode 5.2 in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block. In June 2017, 𬼀 (shite), 𬼂 (nari), and 𬻿 (nari) were added to Unicode 10.0 in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F block.[5] In September 2026, Unicode 18.0 added (koto), (toki), (tote) and (yori) to the Kana Extended-A block, encoded as kana rather than as ideographs; the proposals also covered kashiko, sama, mairasesōrō and to-iu, which were dropped before encoding.[6][7][8]
![[icon]](https://mpnr.duckdns.org/en/embed/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFile%3AWiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
(toki), 
(koto), etc., were actively used in Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods. These ligatures were sometimes placed together along with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries in Japanese school textbooks.[2] Nowadays, these ligatures are obsolete and are not taught at schools anymore.[3]
