In the Japanese writing system, are variant forms of hiragana. History Hiragana, the main Japanese syllabic writing system, derived from cursive form of man'yōgana, a system where Chinese ideograms (kanji) were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. Originally, the same syllable (more precisely, mora) could be represented by several more-or-less interchangeable kanji, or different cursive styles of the same kanji. However, the 1900 script reform determined that only one specific character be used for each mora, with the rest being called hentaigana ("variant characters"). The 1900 standard included the hiragana ゐ, ゑ, and を, which historically stood for the phonetically distinct moras /wi/, /we/, and /wo/ but are currently pronounced as /i/, /e/, and /o/, identically to い, え, and お. The を gana is still commonly used in the Japanese writing system, instead of お, for the direct object particle /-o/. These characters were deprecated by the 1946 spelling reform. Hentaigana are still used occasionally today in some contexts, such as store signs and logos, to achieve "old-fashioned" or "traditional" look. Katakana have variant forms, too. For example, (ネ) and (ヰ). However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's ones. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before the 1900 script regularization. Standardized hentaigana Prior to the proposal which led to the inclusion of hentaigana in Unicode 10.0, they were already standardized into a list by Mojikiban, part of the Japanese Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA). To view hentaigana, special fonts need to be installed that support Hentaigana such as BabelStone Han IPA MJ Mincho Version 5.01 and later Hanazono Mincho Hanazono Mincho AFDKO UniHentaiKana The glyph for example Hiragana wu (𛄟) also needs a special font to display such as Uraniwa Mincho X Sources of hentaigana Hentaigana are adapted from the reduced and cursive forms of the following man’yōgana (kanji) characters. Source characters for the kana are not repeated below for hentaigana even when there are alternative glyphs; some uncertain. In Unicode 286 hentaigana characters are included in the Unicode Standard in the Kana Supplement and Kana Extended-A blocks. One character was added to Unicode version 6.0 in 2010, 𛀁 (U+1B001 HIRAGANA LETTER ARCHAIC YE which has the formal alias HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1), and the remaining 285 hentaigana characters were added in Unicode version 10.0 in June 2017.