hiraganan.

1822 F. Shoberl tr. I. Titsingh Illustr. Japan 122 These two kinds of poems are composed in firokanna, or women's writing.

1859 A. Steinmetz Japan & her People i. vii. 305 The other style, called hiragana, employs at least six characters, radically different from each other, for each sound.

1861 G. Smith Ten Weeks Japan vi. 92 Sentences written in..the irregularly flowing easy current style of the Japanese Hiragana character, are to be met with in every direction.

1863 Chambers's Encycl. V. 687/1 The phonetic alphabet, invented about the year 810 a.d., is known as the Hiragana form of character.

1880 Encycl. Brit. XIII. 585/1 Each character may be written in either the katakana or the hiragana style.

1883 I. Taylor Alphabet I. 35 The Hirakana syllabary was derived from a cursive form of the Chinese writing called the Tsau or ‘grass’ character.

1928 G. B. Sansom Hist. Gram. Japanese 45 At some period in the development of the script, probably about the time when the hiragana and katakana syllabaries were contrived.

1973 Physics Bull. May 280/3 We have also extended the process by including, in addition to the 881 Chinese characters, the 50 Japanese Kata-Kana and 50 Hira-Gana characters.