Definitions for "Katakana"
An angular phonetic subscript of the Japanese language that renders the sounds of the Japanese language into 50 syllables. While katakana and hiragana both render the same syllables, katakana is more “angular” and used largely to spell words borrowed from other languages (other than of Chinese origin), sound-symbolic interjections, or phonetic representation of "difficult" kanji characters in Japanese.
Japanese characters that are used to write words of foreign origin. Lots of anime titles (such as Escaflowne, actually written esukafurone) as well as fantasy-based words and names in anime and manga are written in katakana. Katakana was also developed based on Chinese writing.
n. One of the two common Japanese phonetic alphabets (the other is hiragana). In katakana, each character is represented by 1 byte. Katakana is primarily used to write foreign words phonetically.