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 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; in modern times, this order has been reversed.
The letter u was introduced into the Latin alphabet by Petrus Ramus in the 16th century.[1]
Codes for computing
Alternative representations of U
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
References
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