Ѵ, the letter izhitsa

As it was written

History

Izhitsa is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet and of several later alphabets, usually standing last in the row. It originates from the Phoenician letter waw and the Greek letter upsilon, and it was used in words and names derived from or taken by way of Greek, such as кѵрилъ, Cyril, or флаѵии, Flavius. It represented the sounds /i/ or /v/, the values of the ordinary letters и and в. Its numeral value in Cyrillic is 400; the Glagolitic alphabet has a corresponding letter of the same name, which carries no numeral value at all.

The traditional name, ижица, is explained as a diminutive either of иго, meaning yoke, after the shape of the letter, or of иже, meaning which, the name of the main Cyrillic and Glagolitic letters for the same sound /i/. In its standard form, and most often in a tailed variant similar to the Latin y, izhitsa was also part of the digraph оѵ or оу that represented the sound /u/; that digraph is known as uk, and today's Cyrillic У originates from its simplified form. Church Slavonic editions printed in Russia use the tailed variant of the letter for the numeral, whereas editions from Serbia or Romania, and early printed books from Ukraine, prefer the basic form without the tail.

Russian cursive, the handwritten form of the alphabet used for most personal letters and schoolwork, was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries, which had in turn come out of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books, and the lowercase shapes of modern Cyrillic italic typefaces are based mostly on it.

In Russian the letter was nearly gone before it was formally abolished. Across the 19th century it was lost in favour of и or і, both of which represented /i/, and by 1917 the only two words still spelled with it in common use were мѵро, chrism, and сѵнодъ, synod. The reform implemented shortly after the revolution of November 1917 conflated і and ѵ with и, so that Сѵнодъ became Синод, and with it went the last of the three homophonous letters И, І and Ѵ. The letter outlived the reform in one narrow place: Russian and later Soviet railways ran locomotives with series designations of І, Ѵ and Ѳ, and those designations stayed unchanged until the locomotives were discontinued in the 1950s.