I know katakana can be used for loanwords, onomatopoeia, strange plants,
animals, for emphasis, and more. However, I don't understand why ゴミ箱 is
written in katakana. Can anyone shed some light on the logic/any relevant
etymology?
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2022-04-09T22:04:12.060
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katakana orthography spelling
Why is ゴミ箱 written in katakana usually?
According to the web (e.g. [this](http://www.kankyo-
news.co.jp/ps/qn/guest/news/showbody.cgi?CCODE=59&NCODE=468)), using katakana
is a way of clarifying word borders. That is, ゴミ was used for ease of reading.

The linked column and some other web pages mention that ゴミ looks more
pejorative than ごみ, with which I don't really agree. But using クズ looks to me
more despising somehow than くず (this is subjective visual impression).

Food names are often written in katakana, most probably for the same reason
(e.g. ワカメ instead of わかめ).
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2022-04-09T22:44:40.710
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The word ゴミ is indeed quite likely to be written in katakana. Come to think of
it, though I don't have quantitative data, this word does have a short word
form, high-frequency use, and no stable kanji spelling, all constitute factors
for katakana.

The modern Japanese reading mode presupposes the mixed kanji-kana writing
without spacing between words. The lack of spacing makes punctuation and
script boundaries important clues in visual parsing. The longer same script
(kanji-kanji, hiragana-hiragana...) continues, the more you are prone to
misparse. At first sight, ごみ might be not look a common sequence, but it
sometimes appears in the middle of other words: すごみ (凄み), なごみ (和み), ひとごみ
(人混み), いきごみ (意気込み) etc., and ご- is also an honorific prefix. So, when ごみ is
used in the middle of a run of hiragana, it might not stand out immediately to
your eyes.

For example, if you first see a string 大変なごみ、それから油汚れ, it is pretty probable
that you parse it like 大変 "very" - なごみ "heartwarming" - それから "moreover" -
before noticing something is wrong. Keep writing ゴミ in katakana would decrease
the chance of confusion in this case, but on the other hand it may be clearer
in hiragana when adjacent with loanwords, such as ごみステーション.
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2022-04-10T15:08:29.213
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If you look at [a dictionary entry for
ゴミ箱](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/kanji/%E5%A1%B5/), you can see that the
most common candidate for writing it all in kanji is 塵箱. 塵 is [an obscure
character](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/kanji/%E5%A1%B5/)—it's not in the
set of characters taught in Japanese grade school and it's covered in the
second-hardest level of the [Kanji
Kentei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei), so it wouldn't be
reasonable to expect an average Japanese-literate adult to know how to read it
in this day and age. As a result, ゴミ is usually written in katakana as a
stand-in. This is also common in names of e.g. plants and animals, which often
have obscure traditional orthography that most people wouldn't easily
recognize now.
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answer