thumb|right|200px|A game of shiritori progressing from right to left
Shiritori (; ) is a Japanese word game in which the players are required to say a word which begins with the final kana of the previous word. No distinction is made between hiragana, katakana, and kanji. "Shiritori" literally means "taking the end" or "taking the rear".
Rules
There are various optional and advanced rules, which the players must agree on before the game begins.
Standard rules
- Two or more people take turns to play.
- Only nouns are permitted.
- A player who plays a word ending in the mora "N" () loses the game, as almost no Japanese word begins with that character, except for some loanwords and proper nouns such as (N'Djamena).
- Words may not be repeated.
- For a full official English version of the rules, see the .
- Phrases connected by no (; meaning roughly "of") are permitted, but only in those cases where the phrase is sufficiently lexicalized to be considered a "word".
Example:<blockquote>sakura () → rajio () → onigiri () → risu () → sumou () → udon ().</blockquote>The player who used the word udon lost this game, because the word ends in N ().
Optional rules
- The first word of the game is shiritori, the name of the game itself.
- Dakuten and handakuten may be ignored or added. Thus suupu () may be followed by furo (), and sato () may be followed by dorayaki ().
- A long vowel may either be ignored or considered as a vowel. Mikisaa (/) can be followed by either sakura () or aki ().
- Common pronouns and place names may be permitted. Example: Edo jou (, ), is acceptable.
- Two words spelled with the same kana but different kanji may be permitted. For example, su () can either be spelled as "" () or "" ().
Advanced rules
- Words are limited to a certain genre.
- Instead of using only the last kana, the final two kana must be used again. In this case only the first kana may not be the mora "N" ().
- The length of a word must be three or more syllables.