Iteration marks (Jp. 踊り字 odoriji "dancing mark" or 繰り返し kurikaeshi, lit. "repetition") are used in Japanese to represent a duplicated character: 人人 can thus also be written as 人々. Japanese has three different iteration marks for its three writing systems, namely kanji (々), hiragana (ゝ), and katakana (ヽ). The characters for Kanji, lit. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 Hiragana (平仮名, literally smooth kana) are a Japanese syllabary, one of four Japanese writing systems (the others are katakana, kanji and rōmaji). ... Katakana (片仮名, literally: fragmentary kana) are a Japanese syllabary, one of four Japanese writing systems (the others are hiragana, kanji and rōmaji). ...

In Chinese, a similar mark is used in fast writing to represent a doubled character, but it is never used in careful writing or printed matter, while in Japanese using the kanji iteration mark is usually the preferred form.

Kanji

While Japanese does not have a grammatical plural form per se, some kanji can be reduplicated to indicate plurality. This differs for Chinese, which normally only repeats multiple characters for the purposes of adding emphasis, although there are some exceptions (eg. 人 ren person, 人人 renren everybody). Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ... Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated. ...

人 hito — person

人々 hitobito — people

山 yama — mountain

山々 yamayama — many mountains

However, for some words duplication may alter the meaning:

個 ko — piece, object

個々 koko — piece by piece, individually

時 toki — time

時々 tokidoki — sometimes

来週 raishū — next week

来々週 rairaishū — "next next week" (the week after next week)

Kana

For kana, the iteration mark can be employed when writing by hand but is rarely seen in formal or printed writing. The major exception is some personal names like さゝ川 Sasakawa or おゝ杉 Ōno. The kana iteration marks can also be combined with the dakuten voicing mark to indicate that the repeated syllable should be voiced, eg. みすゞ Misuzu. It is also possible to use multiple iteration marks to repeat a multisyllable word, as in ところゞゝゝ tokorodokoro, although in modern practice this is very uncommon. Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 Kana is a general term for two types of syllabic Japanese script: hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). ... Dakuten (濁点), colloquially ten-ten (dot dot), is a diacritic sign most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced. ...

Repeat marks

In addition to the single-character iteration marks, there are also two-character repeat marks. Used in vertical writing only, they are effectively obsolete in modern Japanese. The vertical hiragana repeat marks 〱 (unvoiced) and 〲 (voiced) resemble the hiragana character ku (く), while the vertical katakana repeat marks 〳(unvoiced) and 〴 (voiced) resemble the katakana character no (ノ), but are easily distinguished as they are typically printed stretched so they fill the space of two vertical kana.