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Occasionally I want to look up a word on [Jisho.org](http://jisho.org/) from a
device where it is inconvenient to use a Japanese keyboard. The default is to
interpret an input as romaji if possible, so that's usually not a problem, but
a word like 音{おん}韻{いん} would be romanized as _onin_ , which Jisho parses as
おにん, not おんいん, and does not find the word I am looking for.

When actually entering the text, I would enter o-n-n-i-n-n, but _onnin_ ,
would be the romanization of おんにん. Is there a standard way to differentiate
between んい and に in situations like this?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-08-21T17:58:03.937
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rōmaji
How to differentiate between んい and に in romaji?
It is not easy to input the right romaji to find a Japanese word especially
when 'ん' is in the middle.

In the case of 'onin', you should place an apostrophe after the first 'n' to
separate 'on' and 'in' and if you type "on'in", the
[jisho.org](http://jisho.org/search/%20on'in) will show it as [音韻]{おんいん}.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-08-21T18:13:12.673
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answer
If we go by what Japanese people use in practice, the standard way _when
typing into an IME_ is in fact exactly what you said. Double the "n" and type
"onninn".

Linguists will probably frown at it, but it is what people do in practice. For
instance, a Japanese mobile QWERTY keyboard with limited space will likely not
even have an `'` key. You sometimes even see people do the double "n" when not
using an IME because they're accustomed to it, and many people never bother
learning "easy to read romanization for foreigners".
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