• THE STORY OF ‘U’, ‘V’, ‘W’ and ‘Y’ is quite complicated, if not absurd. We might suspect this is the case given that we are quite happy to call ‘W’ ‘double-u’ when it’s clearly a ‘double-v’.

Roman or mock-Roman inscriptions use the ‘V’ shape to indicate what we would think of as the ‘U’ sound: ‘SEPTIMVS’ and the like.

The Phoenicians had a letter that looked like our modern ‘Y’ in around 1000 BCE. They called this ‘waw’ meaning a ‘peg’ and it indicated a ‘w’ sound. The ancient Greeks took this in around 700 BCE and called it ‘upsilon’. The Etruscans took the bottom stroke off the ‘Y’ to make a ‘V’ shape and it was this ‘V’ that the Romans adopted, shifting the pronunciation to an ‘oo’ sound before consonants but keeping the ‘w’ sound before vowels. So ‘V’ was doing service as ‘w’ and ‘u’ sounds.

u

People writing by hand as early as the fourth century started to round off the ‘v’ turning it into a ‘u’. In the Renaissance, the printers adopted the rounded ‘u’ as the lower case for ‘v’. Some writers by hand also made their ‘capital’ into a ‘u’ shape.

It took till the seventeenth century for printers to make a distinction between ‘u’ and ‘v’ depending on the sound. Early printers used the two signs interchangeably, with ‘v’ words sometimes typeset with a ‘u’ as in ‘knaue’ for ‘knave’, or, in Roman style, ‘vnder’ for ‘under’.

When the sound of ‘w’ began to develop in northern Europe, including Britain, it was decided that this needed a ‘double-u’, which I’ll look at in its own place!

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

In hindsight this could have been a sound like ‘oo’, or the ‘u’ sound in ‘put’, or even a ‘woo’. Somehow it acquired a ‘y’ sound on the front. I haven’t read a convincing explanation of how or why that came about.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

As with all vowels, this depends on which part of the English-speaking world you come from, the historical origins of the word, the position in the word where the letter falls, and in what combination of letters it appears.

So, as a Londoner, I say the word ‘sun’ very differently from the local way of saying it in Yorkshire. However, when I say ‘put’, that rhymes with the way a northerner would say ‘hut’. My ‘hut’ rhymes with my ‘putt’! Some Scots speakers pronounce ‘put’ as I would pronounce ‘poot’.

We can use it to make a ‘yoo’ sound as in ‘use’ and ‘situation’.

‘U’ hardly ever doubles but when it does, it’s most commonly in ‘vacuum’.

We can combine it with other vowels and the letter ‘r’ (if you’re an unvoiced ‘r’ speaker) to make the same or different vowel sounds, as in ‘cue’, ‘sue’, ‘sour’, ‘ruin’, ‘course’, ‘fur’, ‘pure’, ‘tour’, ‘fleur de lys’, ‘wounded’, ‘wound up’, ‘through’, ‘thorough’, ‘though’, ‘enough’, ‘bough’, ‘brougham’, ‘conscious’, ‘radium’, ‘dinosaur’, ‘Guam’ and ‘duet’ (which, for some speakers, has the virtue of asking the ‘u’ to make a ‘you-w’ sound!).

We have the sound ‘uh-uh’ which can mean ‘watch out!’ or ‘something’s not right’. A word for a ‘fool’ has appeared in the last twenty years which I think could be written ‘wuss’ to rhyme (in my speech) with ‘puss’, not ‘fuss’. Rugby players kick an ‘up and under’.