Ʊ

Not to be confused with the Greek letter Upsilon or ℧, the symbol for the mho (an alternative name for the siemens, a unit of electric conductance).

For Japanese hiragana, see ひ.

For the sound with this symbol in the IPA, see Near-close near-back rounded vowel.

The letter Ʊ (minuscule: ʊ), called horseshoe or sometimes bucket, inverted omega or Latin upsilon, 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.^[1] 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 an actual Greek upsilon is also used for the voiced labiodental approximant; Pullum called this letter script V^[2] and Unicode calls it V with hook.

Ʊ
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
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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

Horseshoe is used in the African reference alphabet, and national alphabets such as those of Anii^[3] and Tem. It most often has the value of /u/ with retracted tongue root.

Use on computers

The majuscule and the minuscule are located at U+01B1^[4] and U+028A^[5] in Unicode, respectively.

Derived characters are U+1DB7 ᶷ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL UPSILON and U+1D7F ᵿ LATIN SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH STROKE.^[6]

See also

• Mho (℧)
• Ou (ligature), the Greek ligature of omicron (ο) and upsilon (υ), sometimes written as (℧)