U


U
Basic Latin alphabet
  Aa Bb Cc Dd  
Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj
Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv
  Ww Xx Yy Zz  

U is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /juː/) is spelled u.[1]

Contents

History

The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter V. See V for details.

During the late Middle Ages, two forms of "v" developed, which were both used for modern u and v. The pointed form "v" was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form "u" was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valor and excuse appeared as in modern printing, "have" and "upon" were printed haue and vpon. The first distinction between the letters "u" and "v" is recorded in a Gothic alphabet from 1386, where "v" preceded "u". By the mid-1500s, the "v" form was used to represent the consonant and "u" the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter "u". Capital "U" was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later.[2]

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of U
NATO phonetic Morse code
Uniform ··–
⠥
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

In Unicode the capital U is codepoint U+0055 and the lowercase u is U+0075.

The ASCII code for capital U is 85 and for lowercase u is 117; or in binary 01010101 and 01110101, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital U is 228 and for lowercase u is 164.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "U" and "u" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

Υ, υ - Upsilon (Greek)

References

  1. ^ "U" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)
  2. ^ Pflughaupt, Laurent (2008). Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany. trans. Gregory Bruhn. Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 123–124. ISBN 9781568987378. http://books.google.com/books?id=63Qnbt2CMiMC&pg=PA124. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. 
The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter U with diacritics
Two-letter combinations
Ua Ub Uc Ud Ue Uf Ug Uh Ui Uj Uk Ul Um Un Uo Up Uq Ur Us Ut Uu Uv Uw Ux Uy Uz
UA UB UC UD UE UF UG UH UI UJ UK UL UM UN UO UP UQ UR US UT UU UV UW UX UY UZ
Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations
    U0 U1 U2 U3 U4 U5 U6 U7 U8 U9     0U 1U 2U 3U 4U 5U 6U 7U 8U 9U    

history palaeography derivations diacritics punctuation numerals Unicode list of letters ISO/IEC 646







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