He (kana)

へ, in hiragana, or ヘ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which represents one mora. The [he] sound is the only sound that is written almost identically in hiragana and katakana and therefore confusable according to the Unicode Standard. In the Sakhalin dialect of the Ainu language, ヘ can be written as small ㇸ to represent a final [h] after an [e] sound (エㇸ [eh]).

Quick Facts Transliteration, Translit. with dakuten ...

he
Hiragana Katakana
Transliteration	he
Translit. with dakuten	be
Translit. with handakuten	pe
Hiragana origin	部
Katakana origin	部
Man'yōgana	平 反 返 弁 弊 陛 遍 覇 部 辺 重 隔 閉 倍 陪 拝 戸 経
Voiced man'yōgana	弁 便 別 部 倍 毎
Spelling kana	平和のヘ Heiwa no "he"
Unicode	U+3078, U+30D8
Braille
Note: This mora was historically pronounced as "pe", with one of two different vowel sounds, which later merged.

Close

It is usually pronounced [he] with the aspirate [h] before its vowel. It is also often used as a grammatical particle indicating direction, which makes only the vowel sound [e]; when used this way, it is sometimes romanised as 'e.

Though the two forms へ and ヘ are usually rendered with a small difference between them, in order to match better with the appearance of other hiragana or katakana characters, they can often be rendered identically. A reader is not expected to distinguish one from the other without contextual clues.