Ü

Ü

ü

Ü, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis. When referred to as U-umlaut, it typically represents a close front rounded vowel.

Contents 1 Letter Ü 2 U-umlaut 3 U-diaeresis 4 Usage in phonetic alphabets 5 Typography 6 Computing codes 6.1 Keyboarding 7 See also 8 References

Letter Ü

The letter Ü occurs in the Hungarian, Karelian, Turkish, Uyghur Latin script, 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 Y. 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 romanised words containing a U, whereas Wade-Giles and Lessing use Ü in all situations. As letter "ü" is missing on most keyboards and the sound "v" is not present in standard Mandarin, letter "v" is used on most computer Chinese input methods to enter the words containing "ü". As a result, romanization of Chinese with the letter "v" representing the ü sound can be seen sometimes.

U-umlaut

An identical 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 sometimes sees it falsely as ii.

U-diaeresis

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.

In Spanish it is used to distinguish between "gue"/"güe" and "gui"/"güi": antigüedad (antiquity), pingüino (penguin). This is also the case for the Nicaraguan demonym, Nicaragüense. Similarly in Catalan language,

• "gue~güe" are [ɡe]~[ɡwe],
• "gui~güi" are [ɡi]~[ɡwi],
• "que~qüe" [ke]~[kwe],
• "qui~qüi" [ki]~[kwi],

as in aigües, pingüins, qüestió, adeqüi. Also ü is used to mark that vowel pairs that normally would form a diphthong must be pronounced as separate syllables, examples: Raül, diürn.

In French, the diaeresis appears over the "u" only very rarely in some uncommon words, capharnaüm [-aɔm] ('shambles') Capernaüm [-aɔm] or Emmaüs [-ays]. After the 1990 spelling reforms, it is applied to a few more words, like aigüe (formerly aiguë), ambigüe (formerly ambiguë) and argüer [arɡ(ɥ)e] (formerly without accent).

Usage in phonetic alphabets

In the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and few related vernacular languages, "ü" represents a range from a [y] to a [ʏ].

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.

Computing codes

character	Ü		ü
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS		LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	220	00DC	252	00FC
UTF-8	195 156	C3 9C	195 188	C3 BC
Numeric character reference	Ü	Ü	ü	ü
Character entity reference	Ü		ü
EBCDIC code pages	252	FC	220	DC
DOS/OEM code pages	154	9A	129	81
Windows/ANSI and ISO-8859 code pages	220	DC	252	FC
Macintosh Roman and Central European	134	86	159	9F

Keyboarding

The methods available for entering ⟨Ü⟩ and ⟨ü⟩ from the keyboard depend on the operating system, the keyboard layout, and the application.

• Microsoft Windows – some keyboard layouts feature separate keys for ⟨Ü⟩
  • Using the Swiss French keyboard, ⟨ü⟩ can be entered by typing «Shift+È»
  • Using the US International layout, ⟨ü⟩ can be entered by typing «AltGR+Y»
• Microsoft Windows: with the Number Lock on, hold down the Alt key while typing on the numeric keypad the decimal value of the code point from the active DOS/OEM code page without a leading zero, then release the Alt key; i.e. «Alt#154» for ⟨Ü⟩ and «Alt#129» for ⟨ü⟩
• Microsoft Windows: with the Number Lock on, hold down the Alt key while typing on the numeric keypad the decimal value of the code point from the active ANSI code page with a leading zero, then release the Alt key; i.e. «Alt#0220» for ⟨Ü⟩ and «Alt#0252» for ⟨ü⟩
• Microsoft Word for Windows: type «Ctrl+:, Shift+U» for ⟨Ü⟩ or «Ctrl+:, U» for ⟨ü⟩
• Mac OS with an English keyboard layout (Australian, British, or US): type «Option+U, Shift+U» for ⟨Ü⟩ or «Option+U, U» for ⟨ü⟩

See also

• Umlaut (diacritic)
• Ӱ ӱ : Cyrillic letter U with diaeresis

References

Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter U with diacritics
Úú	Ùù	Ŭŭ	Ûû	Ǔǔ	Ůů	Üü	Ǘǘ	Ǜǜ	Ǚǚ	Ǖǖ	Űű	Ũũ	Ṹṹ	Ųų	Ūū	Ṻṻ	Ủủ	Ȕȕ	Ȗȗ	Ưư	Ứứ	Ừừ	Ữữ	Ửử	Ựự
Ụụ	Ṳṳ	Ṷṷ	Ṵṵ	Ʉʉ	ᵾ	ᶙ
Letters using umlaut or diaeresis sign ( ◌̈ )
Ää	Ëë	Ḧḧ	Ï ï	N̈n̈	Öö	T̈ẗ	Üü	Ẅẅ	Ẍẍ	Ÿÿ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646