U is the 21st letter of the alphabet used for the modern English language. It is also used in a number of other languages, including French, German, and Spanish. The letter U is the fifth of the vowel letters (see Vowel ). Putt has the sound of short U and cute the sound of long U.
The letter U evolved from the letter V, so the early development of the two letters is the same. Scholars believe the letter V evolved from an Egyptian hieroglyph (pictorial symbol) that represented a mace, a club with a heavy head. The letters F, U, V, W, and Y all came from this hieroglyph. By around 1500 B.C., hieroglyphs had been adapted into an alphabet known as Proto-Sinaitic. By 1100 B.C., an alphabet for the Phoenician language had evolved from Proto-Sinaitic. See Semitic languages .
The Phoenician letter that can be traced to the Egyptian mace hieroglyph is the sixth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, waw. When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet around 800 B.C., waw evolved into two Greek letters—digamma and upsilon. The Greeks used upsilon for the vowel sound of ooh. The Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet around 700 B.C., and they also used the letter for the sound of U.
The Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet by around 650 B.C. The Latin letter that evolved from upsilon was still a V-shaped letter. By A.D. 100, however, a rounded U shape for the letter V had come into use in manuscripts. In the late 1400’s, the V shape was used in printed material at the beginning of a word and the U shape within a word. This practice resulted in such spellings as vnder (under) and euer (ever). By the early 1600’s in France, V began to be used for the consonant sound of vuh and U for the vowel sound of ooh. English printers soon followed this system. But U and V were not counted as separate letters until 1801, with the publication of William Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary. Perry’s dictionary was first to alphabetize words separately under U and V.
