| Hiragana Image: | Japanese_Hiragana_kyokashotai_WE.svg |
| Katakana Image: | Japanese_Katakana_kyokashotai_WE.svg |
| Transliteration: | e, we |
| Hiragana Manyogana: | 恵 |
| Katakana Manyogana: | 恵 |
| Other Manyogana: | 廻 恵 面 咲 |
| Spelling: | かぎのあるヱ Kagi no aru "e" |
| Unicode: | U+3091, U+30F1 |
| Flag1: | 9 |
| Flag2: | 3 |
| Flag3: | 1 |
Japanese: ゑ in, or Japanese: ヱ in, is an obsolete Japanese that is normally pronounced pronounced as /[e]/ in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with "Japanese: ゑ゙" in was introduced to represent [ve] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is presumed that Japanese: 'ゑ' represented pronounced as /ja/, and that Japanese: ゑ and Japanese: え indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura and Taishō periods, when they both came to be pronounced as Japanese: 'イェ' pronounced as /ja/, later shifting to the modern Japanese: 'エ' pronounced as /[e]/. Along with the kana for (Japanese: 'ゐ' in, Japanese: 'ヰ' in), this was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946 and replaced with Japanese: [[E (kana)|え]] and Japanese: エ. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia or foreign words, the katakana form Japanese: 'ウェ' (U-[small-e]) is used, as in Japanese: "ウェスト" for "west".
The still sees some modern-day usage as a stylistic variant of Japanese: 'え/エ'. Ebisu is usually written as Japanese: "えびす", but sometimes Japanese: "ゑびす" like,[1] and name of the beer, which is actually pronounced "Ebisu". The Japanese title of the Rebuild of Evangelion series is . VTuber Sakamata Chloe (沙花叉クロヱ) of Hololive Production uses Katakana ヱ (we) in place of the pronounced エ (e). Japanese: ヱ is sometimes written with a, Japanese: ヹ, to represent a pronounced as //ve// sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this, and the digraph Japanese: ヴェ is far more common. The Meiji-era Classical Japanese version of the Bible renders Jehovah as Japanese: ヱホバ (Yehoba), and Japanese: ヱ (ye) is also used to transcribe any Hebrew name spelled with Je in English (pronounced "ye" in Hebrew, though), such as ; the modern Japanese version, on the other hand, only uses Japanese: エ (e), hence Japanese: エホバ (Ehoba) and Japanese: エフタ (Efuta).
Japanese: ゑ is still used in several Okinawan orthographies for the mora pronounced as //we//. In the Ryūkyū University system, Japanese: ゑ is also combined with a small Japanese: ぃ (Japanese: ゑぃ/ヱィ), to represent the sound pronounced as //wi//. Japanese: ヱ is used in Ainu for pronounced as //we//.
The Japanese: ゑ is made with one stroke. It resembles a Japanese: [[ru (kana)|る]] that continues with a double-humped Japanese: [[n (kana)|ん]] shape underneath.
The Japanese: ヱ is made with three strokes: