U

U is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the vowel /u/. Historically it is split off from V during the Renaissance to separate the vowel from the consonant; classical Latin wrote both with the single letter V. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter U the digit 3; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

As covered elsewhere in this atlas, Latin originally had a single letter, written V, for both the vowel sound now spelled U and the consonant sound now spelled V, inherited as one sign from Greek upsilon and, ultimately, a Phoenician sign for the sound w. Roman inscriptions used the angular V shape for both values throughout antiquity, and the rounded U familiar today is simply a cursive variant of the same letter that developed in ordinary handwriting during the Middle Ages, without at first being treated as graphically distinct.

Printers and grammarians only began to treat U and V as two separate letters, one a vowel and one a consonant, during the Renaissance; the French scholar Pierre de la Ramee, known as Ramus, is often credited with formalising the distinction in the 1560s, though the practice spread unevenly across Europe over the following two centuries, and dictionaries and typefaces did not fully separate U from V in ordinary alphabetical order until well into the 17th and 18th centuries. U therefore has no ancient graphic identity of its own distinct from V; its status as a separate letter is one of the youngest developments in the entire history of the Latin alphabet, younger even than the invention of W, which depended on doubling the older, undivided letter.