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There is a company which sells tea in teabags that have a haiku printed on one
of the sides (of the teabag). Recently I came upon the following haiku:

```

    昼寝{ひるね}して
        鳥獣{ちょうじゅう}戯画{ぎが}の
             中{なか}にをり
    
```

What does をり in the last line mean? I have a feeling that it is intentionally
written in this way and not as おり (which comes from 居る)

Thanks a lot!
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2020-11-24T09:25:34.903
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2020-11-24T19:51:08.830
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question
orthography particle-を haiku
Strange usage of を-Particle inside a 俳句 (haiku)
Yes, you are right. “をり”means “居る”.
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2020-11-24T11:04:46.627
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answer
> What does をり in the last line mean? I have a feeling that it is
> intentionally written in this way and not as おり (which comes from 居る)

There are two parts to this question, though it seems you probably didn't
realize that when you wrote it. :)

# Part 1: What is this word をり?

This is 居【を】り. It is indeed intentionally written this way, but it is actually
from 居【を】る.

# Part 2: Why is をり written with を instead of the expected お?

This has to do with
[[歴史的]{れきしてき}[仮名]{かな}[遣い]{づかい}](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%AD%B4%E5%8F%B2%E7%9A%84%E4%BB%AE%E5%90%8D%E9%81%A3),
or [historical kana
spellings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_orthography).

English has been notoriously conservative in its spellings, keeping old
spellings long after the pronunciation has shifted and the spelling and the
pronunciation no longer have so much to do with each other. Consider a word
like _knight_. In Middle English and earlier (think Chaucer and [_The
Canterbury Tales_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales)), the
word was pronounced more or less as it's spelled -- you pronounced the "K" at
the front and the "GH" in the middle, producing a sound more like //knixt//
(where that //x// indicates a hard "H" sound like in Scots _lo **ch**_ or _o
**ch** , aye!_). But nowadays? English has tons of odd letter combinations
that are left unpronounced.

In many (most?) other phonically written languages in the world (think
alphabets or syllabaries, as opposed to ideographs as in Chinese, Mayan, or
ancient Egyptian), the spellings are updated when the pronunciation drifts too
far from the way things are written. The Korean word for "to do" is pronounced
something like //hada//, and thus the spelling is 하다 ( _hada_ ) instead of the
older ᄒᆞ다 ( _hoda_ ), which was the way this word was pronounced and spelled
during the Middle Korean stage of the language. French spells the word for
"hotel" as _hôtel_ , pretty much as pronounced, instead of the older _hostel_
as it was pronounced and spelled in the Middle French years. But English? We
just keep the old spellings.

Japanese mostly follows the trend of other languages around the world.
Pronunciations shift -- this is one constant among _all_ languages, so no
surprise there. And as the pronunciations become more removed from the
spellings, eventually some authority -- be it individual writers making their
own decisions in group, or be it some centralized authority like the Ministry
of Education; in modern Japan, the Ministry -- will start using spellings that
are closer to the pronunciation.

## Sound shifts

Broadly speaking, the biggest shifts in Japanese pronunciation have had to do
with the labial consonants: //p//, //f// (strictly speaking, the bilabial
fricative [[ɸ]], which we don't have in English), //b//, //m//, and //w//. For
this post, let's just look at //w//.

As we've come down through history, most of the //w// sounds in Japanese have
vanished. We still have //wa//! But pretty much all of the others have
flattened out to just the vowel value: //wi// became //i//, //we// became
//e//, and //wo// is almost always just //o// (unless someone is deliberately
speaking very carefully). //wu//, so far as we can tell, never existed --
probably due to simple biomechanics, and the way the Japanese //u// vowel is
pronounced, it's actually difficult to say //wu//.

(For a little bit more about the //w// sound shifts, see also [this other
post](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/52149/why-is-konnichi-wa-
written-with-%e3%81%af-and-not-%e3%82%8f/52189#52189).)

## Kana spellings and how they are shown in dictionaries

Since //wo// changed to plain //o//, there are various words that have
historical kana spellings that used を, but in modern Japanese, they're spelled
with お. Historical spellings can often help show how words are derived or
related (the etymologies), and they are also important for understanding
Classical Japanese, so monolingual Japanese dictionaries will often show the
historical kana spellings alongside the modern kana spellings. For example,
[here is the Weblio page for
居る](https://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%B1%85%E3%82%8B). The top entry is from
the Daijisen dictionary, with the following headline:

> お・る〔をる〕【▽居る】

In order, this is the modern kana spelling お・る, with the interpunct or
中黒【なかぐろ】 showing where the kanji portion stops and the okurigana begin. Then
we have the historical kana spelling 〔をる〕 in the brackets. Finally, we have
the kanji spelling 【▽居る】, with that ▽ triangle icon used to indicate where
this reading for this kanji is not included in the 常用【じょうよう】 kanji charts.

So now we can come back to your unstated question:

## Why is をり written with を instead of the expected お?

The を is used here either because 1) this poem was written some time ago in
Classical Japanese, and thus uses the older kana spellings, or 2) this poem
was written more recently, but the author still wanted to give it a Classical
Japanese sense.
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