Shi (kana)

し, in hiragana, or シ in katakana, and the variant form ㋛, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. Both represent the phoneme /si/ although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is [ɕi] ( listen). The shapes of these kana have origins in the character 之. The katakana form has become increasingly popular as an emoticon in the Western world due to its resemblance to a smiling face.

This character may be combined with a dakuten, forming じ in hiragana, ジ in katakana, and ji in Hepburn romanization; the pronunciation becomes /zi/ (phonetically [d͡ʑi] or [ʑi] in the middle of words).

The dakuten form of this character is used when transliterating "di" occasionally, as opposed to チ's dakuten form; for example, Aladdin is written as アラジン Arajin, and radio is written as ラジオ.

In the Ainu language, シ is used to represent the ʃi sound. It can also be written as a half-width ㇱ to represent a final s sound, pronounced ɕ. In addition, it can be written as half-width with a handakuten (which can be entered into a computer as either one character (ツ゚) or two combined characters (ツ゜)) to represent the sound tu, which is interchangeable with the katakana ト゚.