Iteration mark
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Iteration marks (Jp. 踊り字 odoriji "dancing mark" , 重ね字 kasaneji, 繰り返し記号 kurikaeshikigō, or 反復記号 hanpukukigō, "repetition symbols") are used in Japanese to represent a duplicated character. For example, hitobito, "people" is usually written 人々, using the kanji for 人 with a repetition mark, 々, rather than 人人, using the same kanji twice.
Japanese has three different iteration marks for its three writing systems, namely kanji (々), hiragana (ゝ), and katakana (ヽ).
In Chinese, a similar mark is used in fast writing to represent a doubled character, but it is never used in careful writing or printed matter, while in Japanese using the kanji iteration mark is usually the preferred form.
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Kanji
While Japanese does not have a grammatical plural form per se, some kanji can be reduplicated to indicate plurality. This differs for Chinese, which normally only repeats multiple characters for the purposes of adding emphasis, although there are some exceptions (eg. 人 ren person, 人人 renren everybody).
人 hito — person
人々 hitobito — people
山 yama — mountain
山々 yamayama — many mountains
However, for some words duplication may alter the meaning:
個 ko — piece, object
個々 koko — piece by piece, individually
時 toki — time
時々 tokidoki — sometimes
来週 raishū — next week
来々週 rairaishū — "next next week" (the week after next week)
The kanji repetition symbol is sometimes called noma because it looks like katakana no and ma. This symbol originates from a simplified form of the character 仝, a variant of 同 written in the Grass Script style. See this page in Japanese.
Kana
Kana uses different iteration marks, one for hiragana, ゝ, and one for katakana, ヽ. The hiragana iteration mark is seen in some personal names like さゝ川 Sasakawa or おゝ杉 Ōno, and it forms part of the formal name of the car company Isuzu (いすゞ?). The kana iteration marks can be combined with the dakuten voicing mark to indicate that the repeated syllable should be voiced, for example みすゞ Misuzu. If the first syllable is already voiced, for example じじ jiji, the voiced repetition mark is not used: じゝ rather than じゞ.
It is also possible to use multiple iteration marks to repeat a multisyllable word, as in ところゞゝゝ tokorodokoro, although in modern practice this is very uncommon.
Repeat marks
In addition to the single-character iteration marks, there are also two-character repeat marks. They are used in vertical writing only, and they are uncommon in modern Japanese. The vertical hiragana repeat marks 〱 (unvoiced) and 〲 (voiced) resemble the hiragana character ku (く), giving them their name, kunojiten (くの字点?), while the vertical katakana repeat marks 〳(unvoiced) and 〴 (voiced) resemble the katakana character no (ノ), but are easily distinguished as they are typically printed stretched so they fill the space of two vertical kana.
If a dakuten is added, it applies to the first character of the repeated word. For example, tokorodokoro could be written vertically as tokoro (ところ?) plus this mark.
