is a

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

character composed of the letter 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 when computer character sets such as CP437 and

ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology— 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 19 ...

were designed. However much software assumes that conversion from lower-case to upper-case and then back again is lossless, so was added to many character sets such as

CP1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. Initially t ...

ISO 8859-15 ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1999. ...

, and

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. This phenomenon also arose for the German eszett .

Usage

French

It occurs in French as a variant of in a few proper nouns, as in the name of the Parisian suburb of

L'Haÿ-les-Roses L'Haÿ-les-Roses () is a Communes of France, commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the Kilometre Zero, centre of Paris. L'Haÿ-les-Roses is a Subprefectures in France, subprefecture of the Val-de-Marne ''Département ...

() and in the surname of the

house of Croÿ The House of Croÿ () is an old European noble family of princely and historically sovereignty, sovereign rank, which held a seat in the Reichstag (Holy Roman Empire), Imperial Diet from 1486, and was elevated to the rank of Princes of the Holy Ro ...

Hungarian

It occurs in a few Hungarian names as well, such as

Lajos Méhelÿ Lajos Méhelÿ (August 24, 1862 – February 4, 1953) was a Hungarian zoologist, herpetologist, professor, and author. He remains controversial due to his Social Darwinist and racialist publications. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sc ...

and Margit Danÿ.

Tlingit

Tlingit The Tlingit or Lingít ( ) are Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. , they constitute two of the 231 federally recognized List of Alaska Native tribal entities, Tribes of Alaska. Most Tlingit are Alaska Natives; ...

, ÿ represented the sound , but is not used today as the sound has merged with and .

Paunaka

In Paunaka, this letter represents the vowel .

Other

IPA uses to transcribe the

close central compressed vowel } The close central rounded vowel, or high central rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is }. ...

, a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The Cocama language also uses this letter. The character has also found use as a

metal umlaut A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is a diacritic that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of mainly hard rock or heavy metal bands—for example, those of Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, Motörhea ...

In Unicode

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

References

Letters with diaeresis Latin letters with diacritics Phonetic transcription symbols {{latin-script-stub