U

21st letter of the English alphabet, and the 20th in the ancient Roman, in which it was identical with v. U has many different sounds, as in the pronunciation of the English words ‘truth’, ‘music’, ‘bull’, ‘cut’, ‘busy’, and ‘bury’.

In the Etruscan alphabet, a descendant of the Greek and the ancestor of the Latin alphabet, the vowel u was written v. The Romans also wrote v, which had the sound either of the vowel u or the consonant v. In the early Middle Ages v and u were used interchangeably for the consonant and vowel sounds. By the late Middle Ages u was mainly employed for the vowel.