I go by “Moose” as my online alias or online name in video games and have
friends that call me moose as a nickname. I recently decided that I want to
get a tattoo of the word “Moose” on my wrist but in Japanese characters but
when I do more research on it I get so many different results and one is not
consistent. I would really appreciate the help in making my decision on which
spelling in Japanese to get on my wrist. Ty.
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question
grammar translation meaning word-choice english-to-japanese
What would be the correct way to say “Moose” in Japanese? Ty in advance
箆鹿 - herajika - seems to be the best-fitting term, being the Japanese term for
both American moose and European elk. Weblio gives it as a translation of
"alces alces", which is the formal species name for moose. Google Image Search
also returns images of moose when you search (a good quick test that a term
describes the noun you think it does), which can be a good test that a word
means more or less what you're looking for. It is also the title of the
Japanese Wikipedia article describing alces alces.

Some more information that may help you:

As pointed out in the comments, 箆鹿 literally means "spatula deer." That
doesn't make it the wrong word - it really is the Japanese word for moose -
but you may want to consider that it will look quite odd to anyone who knows
what it means. The kanji are also quite rare - any native speaker would write
them in katakana as ヘラジカ.

If you are specifically looking for a kanji to use as a tattoo, and you want
it to mean "moose", you might also consider 大鹿, which can also mean "moose"
but literally just means "big deer" and doesn't have the strange "spatula"
kanji.

If you are not specifically looking for kanji, you might also consider simply
going with ムース, which is simply "muusu" written phonetically and is also a
valid term for "moose" that seems to be used when one wants to distinguish
between North American moose and European elk.
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