Ateji

In modern Japanese, ateji (当て字, 宛字 or あてじ, pronounced [ate(d)ʑi]; "assigned characters") principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters.

In particular, ateji are frequently employed in manga and song lyrics by pairing kanji with furigana for creative effect and to add layers of meaning.

From the ateji "Amerika" (亜米利加, America), the second character was taken, resulting in the semi-formal coinage "Beikoku" (米国), which literally translates to "rice country" but means "United States of America"; however, "アメリカ" remains in far more common use in modern Japanese.

When using ateji to represent loanwords, the kanji are sometimes chosen for both their semantic and phonetic values, a form of phono-semantic matching.

A stock example is '倶楽部' ("kurabu") for "club", where the characters can be interpreted loosely in sequence as "together", "fun" and "place".

On one front, scholars and monks used kanji characters as translation aids between the lines of Chinese texts.

The kana of modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana developed as organic simplifications of man'yōgana that were eventually codified.

The terms prajñāpāramitā (hannya-haramitta (般若波羅蜜多)) and samyaksaṃ-bodhi (sanmyakusanbodai (三藐三菩提)), or "perfection of wisdom" and "fully enlightened", both appear in the Heart Sutra, but are written using ateji.

A loanword example is reading shukuteki (宿敵, "mortal enemy") as the English-derived word raibaru, or "rival".

The three most notable examples are pēji (頁, ページ, "page"), zero (零, ゼロ, "zero"), and dāsu (打, ダース, "dozen").

Botan (釦/鈕, ボタン) (from the Portuguese botão, "button") and mētoru (米, メートル, 'meter") are marginally understood or used in some settings, but most are obscure.

These are primarily found in older literature, but are occasionally used in variant spellings of everyday words, such as oya-shirazu (親不知, "wisdom tooth").