U (У у; italics: У у) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the close back rounded vowel , somewhat like the pronunciation of in "boot" or rule. The forms of the Cyrillic letter U are similar to the lowercase of the Latin letter Y (Y y; Y y). History Historically, Cyrillic U evolved as a specifically East Slavic short form of the digraph used in ancient Slavic texts to represent . The digraph was itself a direct loan from the Greek alphabet, where the combination (omicron-upsilon) was also used to represent . Later, the o was removed, leaving the modern upsilon-only form. Consequently, the form of the letter is derived from Greek upsilon , which was parallelly also taken over into the Cyrillic alphabet in another form, as Izhitsa . (The letter Izhitsa was removed from the Russian alphabet in the orthography reform of 1917/19.) It is normally romanised as "u", but in Kazakh, it is romanised as "w". In the Cyrillic numeral system, the Cyrillic letter U had a value of 400. In other languages In Tuvan the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel. Related letters and other similar characters Υ υ : Greek letter Upsilon U u : Latin letter U Y y : Latin letter Y Ў ў : Cyrillic letter Short U, used in Belarusian, Dungan, Siberian Eskimo (Yuit), Uzbek Ӯ ӯ : Cyrillic letter U with macron, used in Tajik and Carpatho-Rusyn Ӱ ӱ : Cyrillic letter U with diaeresis, used in Altai (Oyrot), Khakas, Gagauz, Khanty, Mari Ӳ ӳ : Cyrillic letter U with double acute, used in Chuvash Ү ү : Cyrillic letter straight U, used in Mongolian, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, Dungan and other languages Ұ ұ : Cyrillic letter Straight U with stroke, used in Kazakh Ꭹ Ꮍ : The syllables gi and mu of the Cherokee syllabary; Ꭹ (gi) notably appearing in the Cherokee self-designation ᏣᎳᎩ (Tsalagi) ע: The Hebrew letter Ayin Computing codes References External links Vowel letters