U is the twenty-first letter in the
basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
u; the plural is
ues, though this is rare.
History
The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter
Waw by way of the letter
V. See the letter
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.
Codes for computing
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
