human language, character. /kahn'jee/ (From the Japanese kan - the Chinese Han dynasty, and ji - glyph or letter of the alphabet. Not capitalised. Plural kanji) The Japanese word for a Han character used in Japanese. Kanji constitute a part of the writing system used to represent the Japanese language in written, printed and displayed form. The term is also used for the collection of all kanji letters. US-ASCII doesn't include kanji characters, but some character encodings, including Unicode, do. The Japanese writing system also uses hiragana, katakana, and sometimes romaji (Roman alphabet letters).