Ma (kana)
Character of the Japanese writing system
Ma (hiragana: ま, katakana: マ) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. The hiragana is made in three strokes, while the katakana in two. Both represent [ma].
01Stroke order
The hiragana ま is made with three strokes:
- An upper horizontal line from left to right.
- Another horizontal line going from left to right under the first stroke.
- A vertical line from top to bottom, then a small loop towards the left, which then crosses the vertical line going to the right.
The katakana マ is made with two strokes:
- A horizontal line from left to right, accompanied with a diagonal line towards the bottom-left.
- A small line at the end of the diagonal line.


02Other communicative representations
| Japanese radiotelephony alphabet | Wabun code |
| マッチのマ Matchi no "Ma" |
▄▄▄ ▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ⓘ |
| Japanese Navy Signal Flag | Japanese semaphore | Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling) | Braille dots-1356 Japanese Braille |
- Full Braille representation
| ま / マ in Japanese Braille | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ま / マ ma | まあ / マー mā | Other kana based on Braille ま | |
| みゃ / ミャ mya | みゃあ / ミャー myā | ||
| Preview | ま | マ | マ | ㋮ | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | HIRAGANA LETTER MA | KATAKANA LETTER MA | HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER MA | CIRCLED KATAKANA MA | ||||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 12414 | U+307E | 12510 | U+30DE | 65423 | U+FF8F | 13038 | U+32EE |
| UTF-8 | 227 129 190 | E3 81 BE | 227 131 158 | E3 83 9E | 239 190 143 | EF BE 8F | 227 139 174 | E3 8B AE |
| Numeric character reference | ま | ま | マ | マ | マ | マ | ㋮ | ㋮ |
| Shift JIS | 130 220 | 82 DC | 131 125 | 83 7D | 207 | CF | ||
| EUC-JP | 164 222 | A4 DE | 165 222 | A5 DE | 142 207 | 8E CF | ||
| GB 18030 | 164 222 | A4 DE | 165 222 | A5 DE | 132 49 154 51 | 84 31 9A 33 | ||
| EUC-KR / UHC | 170 222 | AA DE | 171 222 | AB DE | ||||
| Big5 (non-ETEN kana) | 198 226 | C6 E2 | 199 118 | C7 76 | ||||
| Big5 (ETEN / HKSCS) | 199 101 | C7 65 | 199 218 | C7 DA | ||||


Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ma (kana)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Hiragana ま stroke order animation.gif by Sirgazil, CC0
- Katakana マ stroke order animation.gif by Sirgazil, CC0
- ま-bw.png by D.328 (talk · contribs), CC BY-SA 3.0
- マ-bw.png by Made by me, M4RC0, using Photoshop. We are making this kind of picture following the protocol of the section : Bitmap Image (PNG), CC BY-SA 2.0
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