I noticed that 菜 is missing a reading, かず as in お菜
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That doesn’t generally seem to be considered a reading for that character; for instance Daijisen lists only さい and な as readings, and Kanjigen agrees. I guess that would make お菜 ateji?
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Yeah. Jisho says おかず is usually kana-only. Wiktionary doesn’t have the etymology, but nor does it even list お菜 as a possible way of writing おかず. It does list お数, though, which might be an origin, and that’d make お菜 ateji.
Would that not be gikun rather than ateji? Since 菜 doesn’t have a reading at all similar to かず but it does have the meaning of “side dish.”
Edit: Wait, no, that’s only using the meaning as the reading, isn’t it, not using a kanji with the same meaning but different reading. But ateji is still using kanji for reading regardless of meaning, even if meaning can influence the use of one kanji over another as long as it has a similar reading. idk, I think I’m confusing myself.
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While looking this up, I found it interesting to note that both お菜 and お数 are technically valid (albeit rare) writings, as are 御菜 and 御数.
Though it’s by far more commonly written in kana alone.
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I am very loose with the terminology here and tend to call the whole lot of “just read this word like this” ateji; there might well be a more precise word…
Ateji is when you use a kanji for its reading only, like 沢山, so it’s kind of the opposite of that. With ateji you can guess the reading of the word based on the kanji but not the meaning. お菜 (おかず) would be using the kanji for meaning only and forcing an exceptional reading.
Gikun might be more appropriate for that, although I don’t know if it would be used for semi-standard readings you can find in some dictionaries.
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Looking at the Wikipedia article for 当て字 it looks like in a broad sense it means both “right meaning, ignore the reading” and “right reading, ignore the meaning”, though you can use it in a narrow sense covering only “right reading, wrong meaning”. So I wasn’t using the term completely wrong 
当て字は、「（当座の）字を当てる」という日本語の表現に由来した概念であり、通例は漢字の転用についていう。具体的には、
- 漢字の字義を無視し、読み方のみを考慮して漢字を当てる場合。狭義にはこれのみを指す。借字ともいう。仮借を参照。
- 漢字の読み方を無視し、字義のみを考慮して漢字を当てる場合。広義にはこれを含む解釈もある。なお六書の「転注」がこれを指すとする学説がある。日本語の熟字訓も含まれる。
の両者をいう。
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Uh, I’ve only seen it used in the first sense in English. In the end isn’t “ignore reading, just use meaning” what kunyomi is about when you get down to it? They even mention 熟字訓.
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English Wikipedia says
In modern Japanese, ateji (当て字, 宛字 or あてじ, pronounced [ate(d)ʑi]; “assigned characters”) principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters.[…] Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.
so that’s an English source that allows for it having both. (Though given this is a community of people learning Japanese and it’s a technical term about the language, I think I am happy to keep the Japanese usage even when writing in English.)
Personally the reason I tend to lump both types under one term is that what it really means to me is “this word is a special case, you need to just learn the reading and the kanji, the reading might or might not be splittable neatly between the kanji, and don’t expect it to generalise to any other words”. I don’t find the subdivision into “this weird special case is using characters for their meaning” versus “for their reading” is something that I need to talk about.
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Yeah it’s just strange to lack a specific term to refer to phonetic ateji. Seems like a less useful definition for me if we decide to use ateji for kun readings.
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