U

For other uses of "U", see U (disambiguation).

Look up U, u in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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

History

During the late Middle Ages, two forms of "v" or "u" 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. Eventually, in the 1700s, to differentiate between the consonant and vowel sounds, the "v" form was used to represent the consonant, and "u" the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter "u". Capital "U" appeared at this time; previously, V was used in all cases. Initially, once the letters \'u\' and \'v\' were established as separate letters, \'v\' preceded \'u\' in the alphabet; in modern times, this order has been reversed.

The letter \'u\' was introduced into the Latin alphabet by Petrus Ramus in the 16th century.The Kensington Runestone - sk(l)ar

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of U

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Uniform		··–
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	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.

References

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

U

• V
• W
• Ŭ
• Ʉ
• Ů
• µ

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia