tiny abbreviations stuffed into a single character space called : (for centimeters; ), (for kilo; ), amongst others. In a few cases, the etymology of a word is unclear, and hence whether the term is a borrowing or not cannot be determined. There are occasional spellings which derive from (Japanese form of literary Chinese), where the kanji form follows literary Chinese, but the pronunciation follows Japanese. An example of this is writing (, "no, not") before a kanji for a verb, corresponding to the verb inflection () – for example, writing for "not knowing". The word is read as (as if it were a native Japanese verb), though in this case is also a Sino-Japanese word (a noun), read as , meaning "ignorance". These are primarily found in older literature, but are occasionally used in variant spellings of everyday words, such as . See also Japanese exonyms in Chinese Transcription into Chinese characters References Further reading Painting Worlds and Words by Mia Lewis Japanese words and phrases Japanese writing system terms Kanji Transliteration