Y, the Sütterlin letter y

History

The letter Y is the 25th letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a close front rounded vowel, known in German as 'Ypsilon' and found in Greek loanwords and historical toponyms.

Sütterlin lowercase y features an upright cup in the middle zone that extends into a straight descending loop beneath the baseline. Capital Y is a balanced, upright fork with a straight descender.

Historically, y appeared in older spellings of German place names and royal titles ('Bayern', 'Speyer', 'Smyrna'). King Ludwig I of Bavaria famously ordered the spelling of his kingdom changed from 'Baiern' to 'Bayern' in the nineteenth century.

The name ypsilon comes from Greek and means simple y.^[1] Y is one of the youngest letters of the Latin alphabet and shares most of its history with U, V and W;^[2] it goes back to the Phoenician letter waw.^[3] Greek has no letter for the u sound and writes it with omicron followed by upsilon,^[4] which is why transcriptions from Greek write ou.^[5]