々

Glyph origin
One theory holds that it is simplified from, a variant of , written in cursive.

Usage notes
In Japanese, the symbol is used in any kind of writing. In Chinese, it is sometimes used in casual horizontal writing (or calligraphy) to indicate a repeated character, but not in formal writing or in print. More often, is used (though still only casually), or sometimes the older. Usually, however, the character is simply written twice, without the use of any of the above symbols.

Usage notes
In Japanese, this mark is formally called or. More casually, it is called noma since it looks like a ligature of the katakana, , , or.

々 is generally used within a word, and not across lexical boundaries. For example, will not change into *. There are some exceptions:
 * 1) in very common words such as
 * 2) if reduplication of the same kanji may imply that something that should happen once will happen again. For example,  may be misconstrued to mean two wedding ceremonies (and therefore a divorce of the marriage in question), so the second kanji may be replaced by 々.

A distinction may sometimes be made between this mark and the vertical iteration mark 〻, but in modern Japanese, 々 is commonly used in both horizontal and vertical writing.

々 is avoided at the beginnings of lines, and instead, the kanji is simply duplicated. However, this is not true for proper nouns containing 々 (e.g. the name 佐々木), which may straddle a line break.