(linguistics) grammatical tense / (Japanese grammar) a conjugation form of a verb

one's clothing and appearance / one's body shape or form / one's circumstances or situation / the shape or form of something

following the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of a verb, indicates the state of the affixed verb or phrase: compare English just as

shapes

alternative energy, substitute energy

alternative medicine

the Cyrillic script

(computing) ghost character (kanji included in JIS X 0208 but of unknown origin)

corrupt characters or letters, especially from display or transfer through an inappropriate character set or encoding, e.g., •¶Žš‰»‚¯, which is a corruption of 文字化け

(orthography, typography) a minuscule (lower-case letter)