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u

characternounpronounadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • Australia//a//
  • //ˈjuː//
  • //ɪʊ̯//

The twenty-first letter of the English alphabet, called u and written in the Latin script.

character

  1. 1

    The twenty-first letter of the English alphabet, called u and written in the Latin script.

    I prefer the u in Arial to the one in Times New Roman.

Etymology

From Middle English lower case letter v (also written u), from Old English lower case u, from 7th century replacement by lower case u of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc letter ᚢ (u, ur), derived from Raetic letter u. Before the 1700s, the pointed form v was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form u was used elsewhere, regardless of sound. So whereas valor and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed haue and vpon. Eventually, in the 1700s, to differentiate between the consonant and vowel sounds, the v form was used to represent the consonant, and u the vowel sound. v then preceded u in the alphabet, but the order has since reversed.

noun

  1. 1

    The name of the Latin script letter U/u.

  2. 2

    A thing in the shape of the letter U.

pronoun

  1. 1

    Variant of youAbbreviation of you.

    t8k me w u

    "(W)ho knows I wanted her dead? cuz i only told u and (D.B.) so unless u told someone ..."

    What r u doing? Jacquie texted Opal. She put her phone on the bed and went to her suitcase to get her swimsuit.

adjective

  1. 1

    Variant of underwaterAbbreviation of underwater.

Forms

plural
us, u's, ues, urselves
singular
urself
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).