is Japanese for "loan word" or "borrowed word", and indicates a transliteration (or "transvocalization") into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese, but in modern times, primarily from English or from other European languages. These are primarily written in the katakana phonetic script, with a few older terms written in Chinese characters (kanji); this latter is known as ateji.