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Wikipedia / Kanji

Kanji (; , hiragana: かんじ, Katakana: カンジ, , ) are logographic Chinese characters, historically adapted from Chinese writing scripts, used in the writing of Japanese. They comprised a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used today, along with the subsequently derived syllabic (phonographicic) scriptss of and . Kanji may have one or more readings, conventionally grouped into two categories: kun'yomi, based on native Japanese words associated with the characters' meanings, and on'yomi, based on Chinese pronunciations adapted to Japanese at different periods. Some characters, known as kokuji, were created in Japan using components and principles derived from Chinese characters.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify kanji, producing the forms now known as . Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has periodically issued lists to guide character use and education. The principal lists comprise 2,136 jōyō kanji for general use and 863 additional jinmeiyō kanji permitted in names; a further character, , is scheduled to become name-permitted in December 2026.

The term is a direct borrowing and phonetic reading (on'yomi) of the Chinese word hanzi (), which is one of the formal terms used when referring to Chinese characters. The significant use of Chinese characters in Japan first began to take hold around the 5th century CE and has since had a profound influence in shaping Japanese culture, language, literature, history, and records. Inkstone artifacts at archaeological sites dating back to the earlier Yayoi period were also found to contain Chinese characters.

Although many characters retain related meanings across Japanese and Chinese, their pronunciations and some of their meanings have diverged. For example, means 'sincerity' in both languages but has the Japanese readings and , alongside Mandarin . Japanese-created characters and words formed from Sino-Japanese morphemes have also sometimes been borrowed into other East Asian languages; Japanese-coined Sino-Japanese words are called wasei-kango.

History

Chinese characters first reached Japan on imported seals, coins, mirrors, swords and other inscribed objects. The best-known early example is the King of Na gold seal, presented by Emperor Guangwu of Han to an emissary from Wa in 57 CE. Chinese coins and possible writing implements have also been found at Yayoi period sites, but widespread production and use of writing in Japan developed later, especially from the fifth century onward. The and preserve the traditional account that the scholar Wani came from Baekje during the reign of Emperor Ōjin, bringing Confucian texts and knowledge of Chinese writing; modern accounts treat the episode as a literary tradition rather than a precisely datable event.

The earliest Japanese documents were probably written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the diplomatic correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 CE has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called were organized under the monarch to read and write Classical Chinese. During the reign of Empress Suiko (593–628), the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court.

From the seventh century, large numbers of inscribed wooden tablets called () document administrative records, labels for goods, correspondence and writing practice. Their survival provides direct evidence for the spread of literacy and bureaucratic writing, although earlier inscriptions are known from other objects.

Chinese characters initially served to write Sinitic texts in Japan. By the Nara and Heian periods, reading practices now called used glosses and diacritical marks to render such texts with Japanese word order, particles, and inflections.

Chinese characters also came to be used to write texts in the vernacular Japanese language, resulting in the modern syllabaries. Around 650 CE, a writing system called (used in the ancient poetry anthology ) evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. written in cursive style evolved into (literally "fluttering " in reference to the motion of the brush during cursive writing), or , that is, "ladies' hand", a style strongly associated with women's writing at the Heian court. Major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in . (literally "partial ", in reference to the practice of using a part of a kanji character) emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, and , referred to collectively as , are descended from kanji. In contrast with (, literally "borrowed name", in reference to the character being "borrowed" as a label for its sound), kanji are also called (, literally "true name", in reference to the character being used as a label for its meaning).

In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write certain words or parts of words (usually content words such as nouns, adjective stems, and verb stems), while are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings, phonetic complements to disambiguate readings (), particles, and miscellaneous words which have no kanji or whose kanji are considered obscure or too difficult to read or remember. are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords (except those borrowed from ancient Chinese), the names of plants and animals (with exceptions), and for emphasis on certain words.

Orthographic reform and lists of kanji

Debate over the place and number of kanji has a long history. The Edo-period scholar Kamo no Mabuchi criticized the burden imposed by a large character inventory and contrasted it with the smaller kana syllabaries; proposals to restrict or replace kanji became especially prominent in modern language reform.

After the Meiji Restoration and as Japan entered an era of active exchange with foreign countries, the need for script reform in Japan began to be called for. Some scholars argued for the abolition of kanji and the writing of Japanese using only or Latin characters. These views were not widespread.

However, the need to limit the number of kanji characters was understood, and in May 1923, the Japanese government announced 1,962 kanji characters for regular use. In 1940, the Japanese Army decided on the which limited the number of kanji that could be used for weapons names to 1,235. In 1942, the National Language Council announced the with a total of 2,528 characters, showing the standard for kanji used by ministries and agencies and in general society.

In 1946, during the Allied occupation, the Japanese government adopted major orthographic reforms intended to simplify education and written communication. Although devised in the occupation context, the 1946 character policy was a Japanese reform and was not imposed by the occupation authorities.

The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established. Some characters were given simplified glyphs, called . Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.

The official character lists are guidelines for general social use rather than a ban on other characters. Characters outside the jōyō list are known as .

jaKyōiku kanji

The are the 1,026 characters allocated across the six grades of Japanese elementary school. The grade-level breakdown is the , maintained through the national curriculum standards of the Ministry of Education.

jaJōyō kanji

The list contains 2,136 characters, including all 1,026 elementary-school characters. It is an official guideline for kanji use in general social life, not a prohibition on other characters. The list was introduced in 1981 with 1,945 characters, replacing the 1,850-character list of 1946, and was expanded to 2,136 in 2010. The 2010 additions include characters used in Japanese prefecture names.

jaJinmeiyō kanji

The are the supplementary characters that, together with the 2,136 jōyō kanji, may be used in children's registered names. The list began with 92 characters in 1952 and has been expanded repeatedly. It currently contains 863 characters; is scheduled to become the 864th in December 2026.

jaHyōgai kanji

are kanji not contained in the jōyō kanji list. They may include characters permitted for names; in ordinary publications they are often printed in traditional forms, although extended jashinjitai forms also exist.

Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji

The Japanese Industrial Standards define coded character sets used in Japanese information processing. The principal kanji standards have been revised or supplemented over time:

  • JIS X 0208, the main legacy two-byte standard, contains 6,355 kanji.

  • JIS X 0212, a supplementary set containing 5,801 additional kanji, was not available in the common Shift JIS encoding and consequently saw limited implementation.

  • JIS X 0213, first issued in 2000 and subsequently amended, extends the JIS X 0208 repertoire and defines Shift-JIS-compatible encodings for the enlarged set.

  • JIS X 0221:2020, the Japanese adoption of the ISO 10646/Unicode standard.

Gaiji

are kanji that are not represented in existing Japanese encoding systems. These include variant forms of common kanji that need to be represented alongside the more conventional glyph in reference works and can include non-kanji symbols as well.

can be either user-defined characters, system-specific characters or third-party add-on products. Both are a problem for information interchange, as the code point used to represent an external character will not be consistent from one computer or operating system to another.

were nominally prohibited in JIS X 0208-1997 where the available number of code-points was reduced to only 940. JIS X 0213-2000 used the entire range of code-points previously allocated to , making them completely unusable. Most desktop and mobile systems have moved to Unicode negating the need for for most users. Historically, were used by Japanese mobile service providers for emoji.

Unicode allows for optional encoding of in private use areas, while Adobe's SING (Smart INdependent Glyphlets) technology allows the creation of customized gaiji.

The Text Encoding Initiative uses a element to encode any non-standard character or glyph, including gaiji. The g stands for .

Total number of kanji

There is no definitive count of kanji characters, just as there is none of Chinese characters generally. The , which is considered to be comprehensive in Japan, contains about 50,000 characters. The , published in 1994 in China, contains about 85,000 characters, but the majority of them are not in common use in any country, and many are obscure variants or archaic forms.

The official 2,136-character jōyō list provides a guideline for general social use, while many additional characters occur in names, historical texts and specialist vocabulary. Japanese encoding standards therefore cover far more characters than are taught for routine use; the number depends on which JIS or Unicode repertoire is counted.

Readings

Individual kanji may write one or more different words or morphemes, leading to different pronunciations or "readings". Context—including the intended word, whether the character stands alone or forms part of a compound, and surrounding grammatical material—normally determines the reading. For example, may be read for "today" or in expressions referring to the present day. can specify rare, literary or otherwise non-standard readings.

Readings are conventionally categorized as ("meaning readings"), based on native Japanese words, or ("sound readings"), derived from Chinese pronunciations. A character may have readings in both categories, in only one, or—especially in names and compounds—an irregular reading that applies in a particular word.

Some common characters have many officially listed readings. The jōyō table, for example, gives the on readings and and ten kun readings or inflected forms: , , , , , , , , , and .

jaOn'yomi (Sino-Japanese reading)

The are Sino-Japanese readings based on Chinese pronunciations that were adapted to Japanese phonology. A character may have several on readings because borrowing occurred at different times, from different regional varieties, and with different adaptation strategies. Although most Japanese-created characters () have no on reading, there are exceptions: "to work" has kun and on , while "gland" is conventionally read ; their phonetic components are and , respectively.

jaKun'yomi (native reading)

The is based on a native Japanese word, or , associated with the meaning of a character. A single character can have several , while others have none.

jaAteji

In the narrow sense, are kanji used for their established sounds without regard to their meanings, as in phonetic spellings of names or loanwords. In broader reference usage, the term may also include meaning-based spellings whose reading belongs to the word as a whole rather than to the individual characters; these are more specifically called .

Gairaigo

Long foreign words have occasionally been assigned as meaning-based readings of single characters or symbols. For example, was coined for (, "centimetre"), although the unit is now normally written with the Latin abbreviation .

Mixed readings jūbakojuubakojubakoyutōyutouyuto

Kanji compounds can mix and . An on-kun compound is called , after , while a kun-on compound is called , after . The names are themselves examples of the patterns. Other mixed compounds include , and .

Mixed or otherwise irregular readings also occur in phonetic place-name spellings. Sapporo, for instance, has an Ainu-derived name represented by the kanji ; the characters provide a conventional written form rather than the etymology of the name.

Special readings

and are meaning-based readings in which a word's pronunciation does not correspond directly to the ordinary readings of its individual characters. In jukujikun, an established word is represented by a multi-character spelling chosen for its overall meaning.

assigns a context-specific reading according to the meaning of a character or character sequence rather than using its fixed ordinary reading. Such readings may be indicated with , allowing the written form and the supplied pronunciation to contribute different information.

In , the word is read as a whole. For example, "this morning" is normally , and "today" is normally ; neither reading divides into the regular readings of the two characters. The alternative for occurs in expressions referring to "the present day" and in the greeting .

are used for native words such as () and for some older borrowings, including () from Ainu and () from Portuguese. Such words are also commonly written in kana.

A case where jukujikun is used for Sino-Japanese is the word kyōdai, which, prototypically, means "brothers" and is spelt ("big and little brothers"). However, the meaning has been expanded to "siblings" in general, and can assume such spellings as ("(big and little) sisters", alternatively pronounced shimai), ("big brother and little sister") and ("big sister and little brother"). It is also possible to say otoko kyōdai ("male siblings; brothers") and onna kyōdai ("female siblings; sisters").

Because the reading belongs to the whole written word, the number of characters need not match the number of morae or syllables. , for example, has the short reading as well as and other historical forms.

The written form of a is tied to a particular word, and the same characters may also have a regular Sino-Japanese reading. For example, can be read for "reindeer", alongside the rarer Sino-Japanese reading .

The word represented by is often native Japanese or an old borrowing. Most are nouns, but established readings also occur in other word classes. Their histories can involve contraction or fusion; , for example, developed from an older form .

Inflected words can also have whole-word readings. Examples include (, "cute"), (, "appropriate") and (, "to be in vogue"). Their identifies the inflection even though the kanji sequence is not read character by character.

Typographically, furigana for a whole-word reading may be centred over the entire compound rather than aligned character by character, reflecting that the reading belongs to the word as a unit.

Single character gairaigo

In rare cases, a character has a meaning-based reading borrowed from a modern foreign language, although modern loanwords are normally written in katakana. Examples recorded in dictionaries include , , , and the unit character . Such readings are conventionally shown in katakana rather than the hiragana used for native kun readings.

jaNanori

Some kanji have name readings called . These may preserve uncommon or historically specialized readings and are used principally in personal names; place names likewise contain conventional readings not necessarily predictable from ordinary vocabulary.

When to use which reading

Although compounds favour and independent native words often use , these are tendencies rather than mechanical rules. Many characters have several readings, and the intended word must be identified from context; names and place names are especially unpredictable.

A character followed by often has a kun reading, as in "red" and "see", but this is not absolute: "feel" has a Sino-Japanese stem. Okurigana can distinguish from , both "eat", while remains ambiguous between and , both "open".

Multi-character compounds commonly use on readings, but mixed and all-kun compounds are well established. Examples include "beef" (on-on), "pork" (kun-on), and "letter" (kun-kun). Conversely, a character used as a word by itself often has a kun reading, as in "north", but on-reading words such as "love" and are also independent. Only the lexical and sentence context determines whether , for example, is "gold" or "money; metal".

Multiple readings create written homographs. can be "skilful", "the upper hand", or "stage left"; may be , , or the more formal , all referring to tomorrow. The reverse problem occurs in speech: homographs such as and , both normally , may be distinguished as and .

Legalese

Certain words have conventional specialist readings in legal contexts. The following contrasts are recorded in major Japanese dictionaries:

Ambiguous readings

Where context alone may not distinguish homophones, speakers sometimes substitute a mixed or otherwise distinctive reading. Dictionaries explicitly label a number of such disambiguating forms. Examples include:There are also cases where the words are technically heterophones, but they have similar meanings and pronunciations, therefore liable to mishearing and misunderstanding.

Different kanji for different meanings

Japanese orthography sometimes distinguishes homophonous or historically related words by assigning different kanji spellings according to meaning.

The polysemous adjective yasui is spelt with different kanji depending on its meanings: for "cheap," with the kanji representing the Chinese word for "cheap;" and for "easy; simple," with representing the Chinese word for "easy; simple." Its more archaic meaning, "quiet; calm; at ease; peaceful; at peace; in peace," is preserved in the imperative and the negative , which explains the kanji which represents the Chinese word for "calm; peaceful."

The adjective atsui is spelt as for tangible things hot to the touch, and as for hot weather or climate. and are distinct words in Chinese, although the former can also be used for hot weather or climate. meaning "thick" is unrelated.

The polysemous verb sasu has the following spellings for specific meanings (here listed non-exhaustively): for "pierce; sting" (transitive); for "insert" (transitive); for "point at; refer to; designate" (transitive); for "pour; ignite" (transitive); "close" (transitive); and for "shine; rise; show up" (intransitive) and "raise" (transitive).

The words oji "uncle" and oba "aunt" can be spelt differently depending on the age of the aunt or uncle relative to that of one's parent. If he or she is older than one's parent, the spellings are and ; if he or she is younger, they are and . These spellings are taken from Chinese, although and are specifically the wives of one's paternal uncles rather than just "aunts" as in Japanese.

Alteration of spelling with homophonous kanji

Homophonous kanji have also sometimes replaced older spellings, whether through orthographic reform or conventional substitution.

The character (wa, "harmony") came to be preferred over the homophonous in names for Japan; the latter had acquired disparaging associations in some Chinese usage. See Wa (name of Japan).

The kanji (sai) originally means "talent," but due to its simple calligraphy as well as homophony with (sai), it is often used as a counter for "year of age," although the former has not completely displaced the latter. These characters are not homophonous in other languages, where is cái in Mandarin, in Korean and tài in Vietnamese, while is suì, and tuế.

The word for telephone, in Japanese, was spelt with the Chinese characters for "lightning/electricity," "speech" and "machine" in that order, together literally meaning "electric-speech machine", a homophonous alteration of the original name for the device, (or in kyūjitai), literally "speech-transmitting machine," whereby meant "transmit." The original spelling was first attested in 1878, two years after the telephone was introduced into Japan, and the later spelling came into competition with it not long after, as shown in an 1885 legislative document which pointed out the inconsistencies in terminology in a bill between (with as in "transmit"), (with as in "lightning") and even (terebon, supposedly a misspelling of terehon, an early rendition of the English word telephone). One 1892 English-Japanese dictionary uses the spelling for the "telephone" entry whose definition contains the word "electricity", but for the "telephonic" entry right underneath. Ultimately, only survived and was adapted into Sino-Xenic vocabularies as in Mandarin Chinese, in Korean and in Vietnamese. Likewise, the word was adapted as , and . Compare which has always been spelt as such, adapted as , and . The homophony between "electricity" and "transmit" only occurs in Japanese and Korean, but not in Mandarin and Vietnamese, where is and , while is and .

The word kansū (), a Chinese borrowing, was originally spelt , with the kanji for "box/contain" and "number," thus "containing number," which refers to the fact that functions "contain" variables. The term is first attested in Dàiwēijī Shíjí ( ), a seminal 1859 translation into Chinese of Elias Loomis's Elements of Analytical Geometry and of the Differential and Integral Calculus, resulting from a joint effort between the Chinese mathematician Li Shanlan and the British missionary Alexander Wylie. Due to the nonstandard status of the kanji (kan), homophonous alternatives such as (kan) were proposed, but ultimately (kan, but historically kwan) won out. This homophony only occurs in Japanese, and other languages adopted their own readings of as in Mandarin hánshù, Korean and Vietnamese hàm số, as opposed to their readings of which are guān, and quan.

Place and personal names

Japanese place names draw on on readings, kun readings, phonetic spellings and name-specific conventions. Familiar examples with predominantly on readings include , , and , while examples with native readings include , and . Historical place-name spellings may represent meaning, sound, or a mixture of the two, so their pronunciation cannot always be predicted from the ordinary readings of their characters.

Abbreviated names may select a reading that differs from the full place name. , for example, combines from and from . similarly combines characters from and .

Personal names may use ordinary on and kun readings as well as , and the same written name can have more than one possible pronunciation. Since 2025, Japanese family registers have recorded the furigana of names; the registered pronunciation generally must be recognizable as a reading of the written name, subject to provisions for established existing usage.

Established Chinese names in Japanese have traditionally been written in kanji and read with Sino-Japanese pronunciations, while less familiar names are often accompanied or replaced by katakana approximating the source-language pronunciation. Postwar official guidance retained internationally conventional Japanese forms for a limited set of well-known place names.The same character can appear twice with different surface forms of its reading. Most commonly, the second occurrence undergoes voicing (), as in "people"; other repeated-character words may contain unrelated readings fixed by the word's history.

Pronunciation assistance

The intended pronunciation of kanji can be shown with ruby characters known as —small kana placed above horizontal text or to the right of vertical text, as in . Furigana are used for unfamiliar or non-standard readings, in materials for children and language learners, and when a writer deliberately pairs a written expression with a different spoken form.

Spelling words

Because many words and characters share a pronunciation, a kanji cannot always be identified from its reading alone. In speech, a character may be specified by a familiar word that contains it, by its native reading, or by describing its components; dictionaries instead provide standardized indexes by reading, radical and stroke count.

Dictionaries

General Japanese dictionaries normally give word readings in kana. Character dictionaries conventionally distinguish on readings in katakana from kun readings in hiragana, and may separate the part represented by the character from following ; for example, may be shown as . Character entries also commonly provide compounds and indexes by radical and stroke count.

Local developments and divergences from Chinese

Kanji descend from Chinese characters, but their Japanese use has developed independently over many centuries. Differences from modern Chinese usage include characters coined in Japan, characters assigned specifically Japanese meanings, and postwar Japanese simplifications known as . These differences include:

  • the use of characters created in Japan,

  • characters that have been given different meanings in Japanese, and

  • post-World War II simplifications () of the character.

Mainland Chinese and Japanese simplification policies also produced different standard forms for some historically corresponding characters.

jaKokuji Wasei kanji

Characters created in Japan according to Chinese structural principles are called or . They are often semantic compounds and ordinarily have only native readings, although exceptions such as have an on reading derived from a phonetic component. Other familiar examples include "mountain pass", "field", and "crossroads".

Comparable locally coined characters occur in other writing traditions derived from Chinese characters, including Korean , Vietnamese , and Zhuang sawndip.

jaKokkun

In addition to , existing Chinese characters have sometimes acquired specifically Japanese meanings. These are not newly created characters; the Japanese usages are called (). Authoritative Japanese dictionaries give examples such as "sweetfish", where the corresponding Chinese character historically denoted a catfish. Further examples include:

Types of kanji by category

Han-dynasty scholar Xu Shen, in his 2nd-century dictionary , classified Chinese characters into six categories ( , Japanese: ). The traditional classification is still taught but is problematic and is no longer the focus of modern lexicographic practice, as some categories are not clearly defined, nor are they mutually exclusive: the first four refer to structural composition, while the last two refer to usage.

jaShōkei moji (象形文字)

(Mandarin: ) characters are pictographic representations of objects. Examples include "eye" and "tree". Their modern forms may differ greatly from the earliest inscriptions, and pictographs make up only a small fraction of the character inventory.

jaShiji moji (指事文字)

(Mandarin: ) characters, often called simple indicatives, use graphic relations to represent abstract concepts; examples include "above" and "below". They make up a very small fraction of modern characters.

jaKaii moji (会意文字)

(Mandarin: ) characters, often called associative compounds, combine components interpreted together for meaning. A traditional example is "rest", analyzed from "person" and "tree". The Japanese-created "mountain pass" similarly combines "mountain", "up" and "down".

jaKeisei moji (形声文字)

(Mandarin: ) characters are phono-semantic compounds and form by far the largest structural category. Typically one component suggests a broad semantic class and another approximates the character's pronunciation at the time the compound was formed. Historical sound change and the borrowing of Chinese readings into Japanese can make the phonetic relationship less transparent in modern ; it does not predict a character's native .

jaTenchū moji (転注文字)

(Mandarin: ) characters have variously been called "derivative characters", "derivative cognates", "mutually explanatory", or "mutually synonymous" characters. It is the least clearly defined of the six traditional categories, and proposed examples depend on how the category is interpreted.

jaKasha moji (仮借文字)

(Mandarin: ) are rebuses, sometimes called "phonetic loans". A graph originally associated with one word was borrowed to write a different, similar-sounding word. For example, originally depicted wheat but was borrowed to write the homophonous word "come"; a differentiated graph, (modern Japanese ), was then used for "wheat".

Related symbols

The iteration mark () indicates repetition of the preceding kanji, functioning similarly to a ditto mark in English. It is read as though the kanji were written twice, for example and , and also appears in names such as Sasaki (). Its origin is uncertain; dictionaries note that it is sometimes described as a cursive or simplified form related to , a variant of .

Another abbreviated symbol is , in appearance a small , but actually a simplified version of the kanji , a general counter. It is pronounced when used to indicate quantity (such as , "six months") or if used as a genitive (as in "Sekigahara").

Collation

Kanji dictionaries commonly use radical-and-stroke sorting. Characters are assigned a principal radical, grouped under that radical, and then ordered by their remaining or total stroke counts according to the dictionary's convention. For example, "cherry" is indexed under the four-stroke radical "tree".

Other indexing methods include Jack Halpern's SKIP system, which classifies characters by their visual component pattern and stroke counts.

Modern general-purpose Japanese dictionaries, as distinct from character dictionaries, normally arrange headwords by their kana readings in order.

Kanji education

Japanese elementary-school pupils are taught the 1,026 according to the grade-by-grade allocation table: 80 in the first grade, followed by 160, 200, 202, 193 and 191 in grades two through six. The curriculum also introduces the reading and writing of additional in lower secondary school, but the official list is a guideline for written communication rather than a definition of complete literacy.

Learners of Japanese as a foreign language use a range of approaches, including repeated handwriting, component analysis, vocabulary-based study and verbal or pictorial mnemonics. Research on kanji learning emphasizes that strategy choice varies with proficiency, prior knowledge of Chinese characters and the learning context.

The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation provides the ( ; "Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude"), which tests the ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the tests about six thousand kanji.

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

Glyph conversion