I wrote recently about how the Japanese often find new and inventive abbreviations for words using the English alphabet, such as OL (“office lady”), what female office employees are called, or 2LDK, shorthand for an apartment with two rooms and a main living/dining/kitchen area. The Japanese have some other innovative uses for the English alphabet, too. The English letter E happens to have the same pronunciation as the word for “good” (as in quality, not as in taste), which is ii, and as a result it’s common for advertisers to use that letter to promote a positive image of their products. In a similarly odd fashion, the letter W has come to mean “double” to the Japanese, and Meiji might advertise their delicious Fran brand of double-coated stick snacks as “W chocolate,” which would be understood by everyone here to mean there were two kinds of chocolate used. The letter “w” is also used on the net as shorthand for the Japanese word warau (to laugh), and adding “ww” to a Twitter post is roughly the same as typing “LOL” in English to indicate laughing out loud. If you play Japanese RPGs like Brave Soul, you may notice how the highest rank you can attain is usually “S” rank, which seems to come from the English word “special.” Of course, one of the most famous (or infamous) creative uses of English letters in Japanese is the “H,” which has come to serve as a universal euphemism for anything related to sex.
This is an image from a game called 3LDK.
