Ü

Ü

ü

"Ü", or "ü", is a character which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with umlaut or diaeresis.

Letter Ü

The letter Ü occurs in the Hungarian, Karelian, Turkish, Estonian, Azeri, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar and Tatar Latin alphabets, where it represents a close front rounded vowel (/y/). It is a distinct letter, collated separately, and not considered a simple modification of /u/ or /i/. It is distinct from "UE".

This same letter appears in the Chinese romanizations pinyin, Wade-Giles, and the German-based Lessing-Othmer, where it represents the same sound (/y/) e.g. 玉 (jade) or 雨 (rain). Pinyin uses Ü only when ambiguity could arise with similarly romanized words containing a U, whereas Wade-Giles and Lessing use Ü in all situations.

U-umlaut

Johann Martin Schleyer proposed an alternate form for Ü in Volapük but it was rarely used.

A similar glyph, U with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of u, which results in the same sound as the letter Ü mentioned in the previous section: /y/. The letter is collated together with U, or as UE. In languages which have adopted German names or spellings, such as Swedish, the letter also occurs. It is however not a part of these languages' alphabets. In Swedish the letter is called tyskt y which means German y.

In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, U-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ue". Software for optical character recognition see it sometimes falseley as ii.

U-diaeresis

Blackboard used in class at Harvard shows students' efforts at placing the ü and acute accent diacritic used in Spanish orthography.

Several languages use diaeresis over the letter U to show that the letter is pronounced in its regular way, without dropping out, building diphthongs with neighbours etc.

For example, Brazilian Portuguese combinations "gue" and "gui" are pronounced [ge], [gi] (the silent "u" is used to keep the sound [g], because "ge", "gi" mean [ʒe], [ʒi]), but "güe", "güi" mean [gue], [gui]: pingüim (penguin), agüentar (to bear, support); "ü" may also appear in "qüe": conseqüência (consequence), and in "qüi".

In Catalan the same scheme is used: aigües, pingüins, qüestió, adeqüi. In Spanish it is used to distinguish between "gue"/"güe" and "gui"/"güi": Camagüey, pingüino. In French, the diaeresis appears over the "u" in only some names: Capernaüm or Emmaüs.

Typography

Historically the unique letter Ü and U-diaeresis were written as a U with two dots above the letter. U-umlaut was written as a U with a small e written above: this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots.

In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both a U-with-dots (also representing Ü) and a U-with-bars. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result there was no way to differentiate between the three different characters. While Unicode theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used.

In Microsoft Windows, one can hold alt while pressing 0220 or 666 or 154 on the numeric keypad (when Num Lock is on) as a shortcut to Ü and hold alt while pressing 0252 as a shortcut to ü.

In Mac OS, one can hold alt while pressing u to obtain the dots and then u again (or any other desired vowel that shall receive the dots) to place it under the dots.

The Unicode code point for ü is U+00FC. Ü is U+00DC.

The HTML entity for Ü is Ü. For ü, it is ü (Mnemonic for "U umlaut").

See also

• Umlaut (diacritic)
• U with diaeresis (Cyrillic)