U, the Sütterlin letter u

History

The letter U is the 21st letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a back close rounded vowel, realized as long /uː/ in 'gut' and short /ʊ/ in 'Mutter'.

Sütterlin strictly preserved the U-Bogen: lowercase u consists of two upright rounded downstrokes, with a small curved crescent drawn above the letter. Capital U is an upright rounded basin occupying the upper two zones.

The U-Bogen is perhaps the single most famous feature of German handwriting. Because e, n, and u share similar vertical strokes, spotting the floating crescent above u immediately allows the reader to anchor surrounding letters in seventeenth- to twentieth-century manuscripts.

U shares most of its history with V and W.^[1] Their Phoenician ancestor, waw, stood for w,^[2] and in early Greek upsilon had the matching vowel u.^[3] The Romans first wrote the letter in the pointed Etruscan form;^[4] a distinction between U and V began when the later emperor Claudius was censor, from 47/48.^[5] In the Sütterlin model the umlaut mark over ü is shaped like the letter e.^[6]