Short U (Ў ў; italics: Ў ў) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. The only Slavic language using this letter in its orthography is Belarusian, though it is used as a phonetic symbol in some Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries. Among the non-Slavic languages using Cyrillic alphabets, ў is used in Dungan, Karakalpak, Karachay-Balkar, Mansi, Sakhalin Nivkh, Ossetian and Siberian Yupik. It is also used in Uzbek – this letter corresponds to Oʻ in the Uzbek Latin alphabet. Short U The letter originates from the letter izhitsa with a breve (, etc.) used in certain Ukrainian books at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. Later, this character was probably in use in the Romanian Cyrillic script, from where it was borrowed in 1836 by the compilers of Ukrainian poetry book Rusalka Dnistrovaja (). The book's foreword reads “we have accepted Serbian џ … and Wallachian [Romanian] ў …”. In this book, is used mostly for etymological [l] transformed to [w]. Modern Ukrainian spelling uses (v) in that position. For Belarusian, the combination of the Cyrillic letter U with a breve was proposed by P.A. Bessonov in 1870. Before that, various ad hoc adaptations of the Latin U were used, for example, italicized in some publications of Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, with acute accent in Jan Czeczot's Da milykh mužyczkoú (To dear peasants, 1846 edition), W with breve in Epimakh-Shypila, 1889, or just the letter itself (like in publications of Konstanty Kalinowski, 1862–1863). A U with haček was also used. After 1870, both the distinction for the phoneme and the new shape of the letter still were not consistently used until the mid-1900s for technical problems, per Bulyka. Among the first publications using it were folklore collections published by Michał Federowski and the first edition of Francišak Bahuševič's Dudka Biełaruskaja (Belarusian flute, published in Kraków, 1891). For quite a while other kinds of renderings (plain , or with added accent, haček, or caret) were still being used, sometimes within a single publication (Bahushevich, 1891, Pachobka, 1915), also supposedly because of technical problems. Usage Belarusian The letter is called non-syllabic u or short u (Belarusian: у нескладовае, u nieskładovaje or у кароткае, u karotkaje) in Belarusian because although it resembles the vowel у (u), it does not form syllables. Its equivalent in the Belarusian Latin alphabet is ,Б. Тарашкевіч. Беларуская граматыка для школ. – Вільня : Беларуская друкарня