Hiragana Letter Pu

The Hiragana Letter Pu at U+3077 represents the Japanese mora “pu,” pronounced with a short p sound followed by the vowel u. It is part of the Hiragana block, the primary Japanese phonetic script used for native grammatical endings, function words, and readings of words. In everyday Japanese writing, it appears in hiragana spellings of words and inflected forms where the sound pu is needed, especially in children’s text, language-learning materials, and words normally written without kanji. It is also common in playful or informal spellings, sound effects, and mimetic words, such as ぷぷ for a stifled laugh or teasing giggle. The character is built from the base hiragana ふ with a small handakuten mark, which changes the h-row sound to the p-row sound. In loanwords, the same sound is often written in katakana as プ, so ぷ is most likely when the word is native-style, phonetic, educational, or deliberately soft and casual in tone.