ÿ

ÿ is a Latin script character composed of the letter ⟨y⟩ and the diaeresis diacritical mark.

As a diaeresis is never used on the first letter of a word and all-caps text typically omitted all accents, there was assumed to be no need for an uppercase ⟨Ÿ⟩ when computer character sets such as CP437 and ISO 8859-1 were designed. However much software assumes that conversion from lower-case to upper-case and then back again is lossless, so ⟨Ÿ⟩ was added to many character sets such as CP1252, ISO 8859-15, and Unicode. This phenomenon also arose for the German eszett ⟨ß⟩.

Usage

French

It occurs in French as a variant of ï in a few proper nouns, as in the name of the Parisian suburb of L'Haÿ-les-Roses (French pronunciation: [laj le ʁoz] ) and in the surname of the house of Croÿ [kʁu.i].[1]

Hungarian

It occurs in a few Hungarian names as well, such as Lajos Méhelÿ and Margit Danÿ.

Tlingit

In Tlingit, ÿ represented the sound [ɰ], but is not used today as the sound has merged with [j] and [w].

Paunaka

In Paunaka, this letter represents the vowel [ɨ].[2]

Other

IPA uses ⟨ÿ⟩ to transcribe the close central compressed vowel, a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The Cocama language also uses this letter.[3]

The character has also found use as a metal umlaut.

In Unicode

  • U+00FF ÿ LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS
  • U+0178 Ÿ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS

The lowercase ÿ has the Unicode code U+00FF, or 255, making it often appear when binary files are opened as text files.

References

  1. ^ "French Language Information". Lingvozoft.
  2. ^ Terhart, Lena (2024). A grammar of Paunaka (PDF). Comprehensive Grammar Library. Berlin: Language Science Press. ISBN 978-3-96110-435-2.
  3. ^ "Resolución Ministerial N.° 303-2015-MINEDU". www.gob.pe (in Spanish). Retrieved 2025-06-03.