Hiragana means "ordinary syllabic script." By the 10th century it was commonly used along side Kanji and Katakana as a stand alone representation of the spoken language. Hiragana is also used to write odd nouns, adverbs, adjectives or other obscure/obsolete Kanji or as Furigana (a pronunciation key for uncommon Kanji). These are most often seen in children's stories, teaching material or comics. You may run across them in Television credit and introduction screens.

[.. Insert example of Furigana ..]

The below table describes the rōmaji with the corresponding hiragana symbol. Please note if your browser doesn't support UTF-8 or if you don't have a japanese language font set the following will not render right.