Wikanaとは 意味・読み方・使い方

ゐ, in hiragana, or ヰ in katakana, is an obsolete Japanese kana, each of which represent one mora. It is presumed that ゐ represented /wi/ (help·info) and that ゐ and い indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura period and the Taishō period when they both came to be pronounced [i]. Along with the kana for we, (ゑ in hiragana, ヱ in katakana), this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946, and replaced with い and イ. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia and foreign words, the katakana form ウィ (U-[small-i]) is preferred.