U
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Look up U or u in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
 |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Latin alphabet | |||||
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | ||
| Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj |
| Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp |
| 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 |
[edit] 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]
[edit] Codes for computing
| 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.
[edit] See also
| Υ, υ - Upsilon (Greek) |
|
[edit] References
- ^ "U" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)
- ^ 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 | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Letter U with diacritics
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
