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U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 is spelled u .

ng the mid-to-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.






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U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 is spelled u .

History

During the mid-to-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 valour 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 the contemporary 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
Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
; in modern times, this order has been reversed.

Codes for computing


In Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 the capital U is codepoint U+0055 and the lowercase u is U+0075.

The ASCII
ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
 code for capital U is 85 and for lowercase u is 117; or in binary
Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
 01010101 and 01110101, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC
EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
 code for capital U is 228 and for lowercase u is 164.

The numeric character reference
Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML
HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
 and XML are "U" and "u" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

  • V
    V

    V is the twenty-second letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled vee ....
  • W
    W

    W is the 23 letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled double-u ....
  • U
    U

    U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled u ....
  • ?, ? - Upsilon
    Upsilon

    Upsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 400. It is derived from the phoenecian alphabet Waw ....
     (Greek)


U-Shapes

The Washington Metro's Red Line
Red Line (Washington Metro)

The Red Line of the Washington Metro is a rail rapid transit service operating between 27 metro station in Montgomery County, Maryland, Maryland and the District of Columbia....
 is U-shaped, with two northern ends, one east of the other.