U (У у; italics: У у or <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">У&nbsp;у</span>; italics: <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">У&nbsp;у</span>) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the close back rounded vowel , somewhat like the pronunciation of in "boot" or "boo". The forms of the Cyrillic letter U are similar to the lowercase of the Latin letter Y (Y&nbsp;y;&nbsp;<span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">Y&nbsp;y</span>).

History

thumb|170px|U, from [[Alexandre Benois' 1904 alphabet book. It shows Ulitsa (street) and uraganʺ (hurricane).]]

thumb|170px|A [[PFM-1 training mine, distinguishable from the live version by the presence of the letter У (short for учебный, uchebnyy, "for training").]]

Historically, Cyrillic U evolved as a specifically East Slavic short form of the digraph used in ancient Slavic texts to represent . The digraph was itself a direct loan from the Greek alphabet, where the combination (omicron-upsilon) was also used to represent . Later, the o was removed, leaving the modern upsilon-only form.

Consequently, the form of the letter is derived from Greek upsilon , which was parallelly also taken over into the Cyrillic alphabet in another form, as Izhitsa . (The letter Izhitsa was removed from the Russian alphabet in the orthography reform of 1917/19.)

It is normally romanised as "u", but in Kazakh, it is romanised as "w".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, the Cyrillic letter U had a value of 400.

In other languages

In Tuvan the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.

In certain languages, U is used to mark labialization.

thumb|170px|Similarity with [[Y (uppercase): The grapheme on the left is clearly a Cyrillic U, the one in the middle may represent both letters, the one on the right is clearly a Greek or Latin Y.|class=skin-invert-image]]

  • Υ υ : Greek letter Upsilon
  • U u : Latin letter U
  • Ú ú : Latin letter Ú
  • Y y : Latin letter Y
  • Ў ў : Cyrillic letter Short U, used in Belarusian, Dungan, Siberian Eskimo (Yuit), Uzbek
  • Ӯ ӯ : Cyrillic letter U with macron, used in Tajik and Carpatho-Rusyn
  • Ӱ ӱ : Cyrillic letter U with diaeresis, used in Altai (Oyrot), Khakas, Gagauz, Khanty, Mari
  • Ӳ ӳ : Cyrillic letter U with double acute, used in Chuvash
  • Ү ү : Cyrillic letter straight U, used in Mongolian, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, Dungan and other languages
  • Ұ ұ : Cyrillic letter Straight U with stroke, used in Kazakh
  • Ꭹ Ꮍ : The syllables gi and mu of the Cherokee syllabary; Ꭹ (gi) notably appearing in the Cherokee self-designation ᏣᎳᎩ (Tsalagi)
  • ע: The Hebrew letter Ayin
  • У̊: Cyrillic letter U with ring, used in Shugnhi orthography.

Computing codes

References