U (У у; italics:У у orУ у; italics:У у) is a letter of theCyrillic script. It commonly represents theclose back rounded vowel/u/, somewhat like the pronunciation of⟨oo⟩ in "boot" or "rule". The forms of the Cyrillic letter U aresimilar to the lowercase of the Latin letterY (Y y; Y y), with the lowercase Cyrillic letter U's form being identical to that of small Latin letter Y.
U, fromAlexandre Benois' 1904alphabet book. It showsUlitsa (street) anduraganʺ (hurricane).APFM-1 training mine, distinguishable from the live version by the presence of the letter У (short for учебный,uchebnyy, "for training").
Historically, Cyrillic U evolved as a specificallyEast Slavic short form of the digraph⟨оу⟩ used in ancientSlavic texts to represent/u/. The digraph was itself a direct loan from theGreek alphabet, where the combination⟨ου⟩ (omicron-upsilon) was also used to represent/u/. Later, the o was removed, leaving the modern upsilon-only form.
Consequently, the form of the letter is derived from Greekupsilon⟨Υ υ⟩, which was parallelly also taken over into the Cyrillic alphabet in another form, asIzhitsa⟨Ѵ⟩. (The letter Izhitsa was removed from theRussian alphabet in theorthography reform of 1917/19.)
It is normally romanised as "u", but inKazakh, it is romanised as "w".
Similarity withY (uppercase): The grapheme on the left is clearly a Cyrillic U, the one in the middle may represent both letters, the one on the right is clearly a Greek or Latin Y.
^However, many Dungan books are set using Ӯ, with macron, instead ofЎ, with breve, like the Dungan-Russian dictionary (1968). There is no ambiguity since it is the only У-with-a-diacritic in Dungan. It is used in Dungan syllables for whichpinyin would use-u except in those with labial consonants (indu, 'nu,lu,gu,hu,zu,ru, etc. but notbu ormu)
