syllabary, a set of written symbols used to represent the syllables of the words of a language. Writing systems that use syllabaries wholly or in part include Japanese, Cherokee, the ancient Cretan scripts (Linear A and Linear B), and various Indic and cuneiform writing systems. Some syllabaries include separate symbols for each possible syllable that may occur in the language; others use a system of consonant symbols that include an inherent vowel. In the former type of syllabary, for example, there will be separate symbols representing ka, ke, ki, ko, and ku; whereas in the latter type of syllabary a symbol for ka might be paired with a symbol for the vowel e to represent ke but would stand alone when it represented ka. Other types of syllabaries combine syllabic symbols to represent syllables for which there is no one symbol; in such systems, for example, there may be symbols for ka, ke, ki, etc., but no symbols for kan, ken, kin, etc. Syllables of this latter type might be represented in such a system by combining the symbol for ka with that for an to form kan (ka-an), the symbol for ke with that for en to form ken (ke-en), etc.
Although syllabic writing systems are a great improvement over logographic and mixed phonetic and logographic writing systems (which may require thousands of distinct symbols), they are still much bulkier than alphabetic writing systems, which reduce the number of signs (letters) to the minimum number required for representing the sounds of a language.