Broadly speaking, can be considered a form of , though in narrow usage, "" refers specifically to using characters for sound and not meaning (sound-spelling), whereas "" refers to using characters for their meaning and not sound (meaning-spelling). Many (established meaning-spellings) began as (improvised meaning-spellings). Occasionally, a single word will have many such kanji spellings. An extreme example is , which may be spelt in many ways, including , , , , , , , ,, , and —many of these variant spellings are particular to haiku poems.
Broadly speaking, can be considered a form of , though in narrow usage, "" refers specifically to using characters for sound and not meaning (sound-spelling), whereas "" refers to using characters for their meaning and not sound (meaning-spelling). Many (established meaning-spellings) began as (improvised meaning-spellings). Occasionally, a single word will have many such kanji spellings. An extreme example is , which may be spelt in many ways including , , , , , , , ,, , and —many of these variant spellings are particular to haiku poems.