Meaning
The hiragana and katakana syllabaries. These are made up of characters that represent individual syllables, which are used to write Japanese words and particles. Kana are derived from kanji.
Etymology
Origin: Japanese
Borrowed from Japanese 仮名(かな) (kana, “phonetic character”, literally “borrowed character”, from the way that kana were originally Chinese characters "borrowed" for their phonetic values).
Synonyms & Antonyms
NYT Puzzle Appearances
No published puzzle dates on file for this word yet. It is part of the official NYT Spelling Bee word list for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026.