Golfer

ゴルファー (gorufā): golfer. The English word written in katakana, the syllabary Japanese keeps for foreign sounds, and the only Japanese word for a golfer; the long mark at the end carries the -er. A dictionary of words born from English, compiled by the Osaka Mainichi's English staff, entered it in 1925, five years before the national dictionary's first citation from a novel of 1930, where a road carries the golfers' cars to the links. One word in two scripts: what the katakana tells a Japanese reader is that it is the English word.