Write Your Name in Japanese
Type any name into the tool below and it comes back as katakana, the script Japanese reserves for foreign words, built from how the name sounds rather than how it's spelled. A kanji version is possible afterward, but that's a separate, sound-matched option — not a translation, and not the name's real Japanese spelling.
A dictionary of already-settled spellings sits behind the tool, and the sections below walk through what it actually does, where it can go wrong, and how to make sense of whatever comes back.
Type your name, get its katakana
Enter a name the way it's normally spelled in Latin letters, and the tool converts it into katakana along with a romaji reading underneath. Well-known names are pulled from a maintained list of established spellings; anything else gets worked out fresh from general sound rules. A short table of examples sits underneath in case the script hasn't loaded, or you'd simply rather scan a few names first.
Don't see your name below? Type it into the field above — the tool works it out from the same sound rules.
| Name | Katakana | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Emma | エマ | Ema |
| Olivia | オリビア | Oribia |
| Charlotte | シャーロット | Shārotto |
| Sophia | ソフィア | Sofia |
| Liam | リアム | Riamu |
| Noah | ノア | Noa |
| James | ジェームズ | Jēmuzu |
| Michael | マイケル | Maikeru |
| Sean | ショーン | Shōn |
| Matthew | マシュー | Mashū |
Read what comes back as a row of morae rather than a row of letters. Most characters stand for one timed beat on their own, a consonant fused with a vowel, like ソ or リ, but two marks do their job differently: ー holds the vowel right before it for an extra beat, and ッ holds a brief silence ahead of the next consonant. Both count as full beats in their own right, which is why a name can look short on paper and still take four or five beats to say out loud.
The rules behind the conversion
- Sound comes first. Katakana follows what a name sounds like out loud, not the letters used to spell it.
- Closed syllables barely exist in Japanese, so a bare consonant at the end of a word usually picks up a vowel of its own — a beat the original language never had.
- L and r collapse into one sound. Japanese keeps a single row of kana for both, so names built around either consonant can end up looking identical.
- Length gets its own symbols instead of repeated letters: a stretched vowel is marked with ー, and a doubled consonant is marked with a small ッ placed just ahead of it.
Matthew shows a few of these rules working together. Three consonants in a row on the page, tth, reduce to a single spoken sound, and that sound becomes one mora, シュ, rather than two or three. The w at the end doesn't add a beat of its own either; it folds into the vowel already there, stretching it into a long ー. Three letters' worth of spelling collapse into one mora of speech, and マシュー ends up three morae long, closer to how the name actually sounds than a letter count would suggest.
A closer look at a few names
| Name | Katakana |
|---|---|
| Emma | エマ |
| Olivia | オリビア |
| Charlotte | シャーロット |
| Sophia | ソフィア |
| Liam | リアム |
| Noah | ノア |
| James | ジェームズ |
| Michael | マイケル |
| Sean | ショーン |
| Matthew | マシュー |
Eight of these ten have a page of their own working through the specific vowel shifts, consonant swaps, and length marks behind their katakana, along with kanji built from the same sound. Sean and Matthew appear only here, as plain examples of the tool doing its job.
Where rules alone aren't enough
Sean is a clean example of the tool's real limit: sounding out its letters one at a time, nothing points toward the pronunciation "Shawn" rather than something closer to "See-an." Charlotte fails the same test from a different angle — its opening ch reflects a French pronunciation carried into English, not the sound those letters usually make. Both names sit in the curated list checked before the rules ever run, precisely because a sound-by-sound guess would land wrong for each of them. Anything outside that list still gets an answer, built from the rules alone — a fair, honest attempt, not a promise that it matches a spelling already in use.
Katakana and kanji are two different things
Katakana is the standard way a foreign name gets written in Japanese — what someone actually reaches for at work, at school, or anywhere else the name needs to appear day to day. A kanji version, where one exists, is chosen afterward for how its characters sound, not for what they mean, and a Japanese reader looking at one sees a string of syllables rather than a foreign name.
That distinction matters most for anything permanent. Picking kanji because their sound happens to match a name doesn't make the name Japanese, and it offers no guarantee the result reads as more than an ordinary-looking set of syllables to someone who can actually read it. When the goal is for the writing to visibly say the name, katakana is the version that does that.
FAQ
How do I write my name in Japanese?
Type it into the tool above using its usual Latin spelling. The tool checks a maintained list of established name spellings first and falls back to general sound-based rules for anything not already listed, returning both a katakana form and a romaji reading.
Why do some names have two different katakana spellings?
Japanese absorbed sounds like v and certain long vowels through more than one convention over the years, so a name can end up with two accepted spellings — one older and more common, one newer or more literary. Both point to the same name; neither counts as a mistake.
What is a mora, and why does it matter here?
A mora is one timed beat in Japanese — usually a consonant and vowel together, but also a long vowel mark or the brief pause before a doubled consonant. Counting morae instead of English syllables is what explains why some short-looking names take several beats to say.
Can any name be written in kanji?
In a sound-matched sense, yes — kanji chosen for pronunciation, called ateji, can be found for almost any name. That's different from having a native kanji spelling, though: katakana is what's actually standard, and kanji stays an optional, decorative layer on top of it.
Is katakana what actually goes on official paperwork?
Katakana is the standard, everyday way a foreign name gets written in Japanese — at work, at school, on a bank form, on a business card. What a specific institution requires is up to that institution and to how the name is recorded in a passport, so it's worth checking rather than assuming. A kanji version picked for sound, at least, has no standing anywhere and wouldn't be accepted in a formal setting.
What happens if my name isn't in the examples list?
The tool still works it out, using the same sound-based rules applied to every name outside the curated list. That result is a reasonable, honest attempt rather than a guarantee — some spellings, like Sean's, follow a pronunciation the rules by themselves can't predict.
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