ÿ

For the sound represented as /ÿ/, see Close central rounded vowel § Close central compressed vowel.

Not to be confused with ij (digraph), which may look like ÿ in Dutch handwriting, or with Cyrillic U with diaeresis.

Y with diaeresis
Ÿ ÿ
Usage
Type	alphabetic
Language of origin	Tlingit language, Welsh language, Paunaka language, Cocama language
History
Development	Y y Ÿ ÿ
Other
Writing direction	left-to-right

ÿ is a Latin script character composed of the letter ⟨y⟩ and the diaeresis diacritical mark. (An uppercase form, Ÿ, has a codepoint in some coding schemes (including Unicode) but is not known to be used in any orthography.)

Usage

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]. As with other French vowels with a diaresis, the ⟨ÿ⟩ indicates the second of two vowels in hiatus.

It occurs in a few Hungarian proper nouns as well, such as Lajos Méhelÿ and Margit Danÿ. It also functions as a diaresis, but shows that the ⟨ÿ⟩ is pronounced as separate ⟨i⟩ instead of being the second letter in the Hungarian digraphs ⟨gy⟩, ⟨ly⟩, ⟨ny⟩ and ⟨ty⟩.

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

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

The Cocama language also uses this letter.

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨ÿ⟩ to transcribe the close central compressed vowel, a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages.

The character has also found use as a gratuitous metal umlaut, notably for the metal band Queensrÿche.

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.

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⟩.