Latin upsilon

This article is about the Latin letter. For the Greek letter, see υ. For the Latin letter resembling a lowercase Greek upsilon, see ʋ. For the sound with this symbol in the IPA, see Near-close near-back rounded vowel. Not to be confused with the inverted ohm (mho) symbol ℧, the Japanese hiragana ひ, the Canadian Aboriginal syllabic ᘮ, or Latin epsilon.

Latin upsilon
Ʊ ʊ
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic and Logographic
Sound values	[ʊ] [u̘]
In Unicode	U+01B1, U+028A
History
Development	Υ υ Ʊ ʊ
Other
Writing direction	Left-to-Right

Shapes of horseshoe as designed for the African reference alphabet, clearly based on a serifed shape of the Latin capital U.

The letter Ʊ (minuscule: ʊ), called Latin upsilon or sometimes inverted omega, horseshoe u, or bucket, is a letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet used to transcribe a near-close near-back rounded vowel. Graphically, the lower case is a turned small-capital Greek letter omega (Ω) in many typefaces (e.g. Arial, Calibri, Candara, Liberation, Lucida, Noto, Times New Roman), and historically it derives from a small-capital Latin U (ᴜ), with the serifs exaggerated to make them more visible. However, Geoffrey Pullum interpreted it as an IPA variant of the Greek letter upsilon (υ) and called it Latin upsilon, the name that would be adopted by Unicode, though in IPA a letter closer to an actual Greek upsilon is also used for the voiced labiodental approximant; Pullum called this letter script V and Unicode calls it V with hook.

Horseshoe is used in the African reference alphabet, and national alphabets such as those of Anii and Tem. It most often has the value of /u/ with retracted tongue root.