Katakana Iteration Mark

Katakana Iteration Mark at U+30FD is a Japanese kana repeat sign used to show that the previous katakana syllable is repeated. It sits in the Katakana block and functions as punctuation-like orthographic shorthand rather than as a normal syllable with its own pronunciation. In Japanese text, it appears mainly in words written in katakana, especially names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, and emphatic spellings. For example, a sequence equivalent to カカ may be written カヽ, with the mark taking the sound of the preceding カ. It is the katakana counterpart of the hiragana iteration mark ゝ, and both are most familiar in traditional typography, dictionaries, literary text, and careful reproductions of older writing. Modern everyday Japanese usually writes repeated kana out in full, so this mark is less common in newspapers, interfaces, and casual messages than the actual repeated katakana. A voiced companion, ヾ, is used when the repeated syllable changes to its voiced form, such as repeating カ as ガ. The main practical issue is search and text matching: カヽ and カカ can look equivalent to readers but are distinct written forms.