Y in Different Fonts

A borrowed vowel

Y shares its ancestor with U, V and W: the Phoenician waw, which Greek turned into the vowel upsilon, Υ. Latin had already taken an early form of upsilon as V. In the first century BC, when educated Romans wanted to spell Greek words like lyra and nymphe properly, they borrowed the letter a second time as Y and placed it near the end of the alphabet, just before Z.

That double borrowing is why Y is called “the Greek I” in French (i grec) and traditionally in Spanish (i griega), and why German calls it Ypsilon.

The Ye Olde mix-up

The Y in “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” was never a Y. Old and Middle English used the letter thorn, þ, for th. As handwriting changed, thorn came to look like y, and early printers working with type from the Continent, which had no thorn, used y as a stand-in. So “ye” meant “the” and was pronounced that way. If you want an authentic touch, a real þ is in Unicode as U+00FE.

Every styled Y

The Fraktur Y surprise

The blackletter capital 𝔜 is built from a curved left arm and a long tail rather than two straight arms, and many modern readers don’t recognise it as a Y at a glance. If a name begins with Y, test the Fraktur version on someone before using it. Bold script 𝓨 is much easier to read.

Missing small forms

Y has a small capital, ʏ, used in IPA for the vowel in German Hütte. It has a superscript ʸ but no superscript capital, and no subscript at all. If your small text looks right except for one letter, a y or q is often why.

Lookalikes

The Greek capital Υ (upsilon, U+03A5) and Cyrillic У/у (U+0423, U+0443) look like Y in most fonts. Cyrillic у in particular is identical to a Latin lowercase y, which makes it a common spoofing character. Decorative styles add more: Ɏ (Y with a stroke) for currency, ㄚ (a Bopomofo letter) for the Asian style, ץ (Hebrew final tsadi) for the Thai style, and ﾘ (halfwidth katakana ri) for the katakana style.

How common is Y

Y makes up about 2.0% of English letters. It does a lot of work at the end of words: -ly, -y, -ty, and my, by, any, every. So a styled sentence will often end words on whatever Y you pick, and the descender of 𝓎 or 𝔂 can collide with the line below in tight layouts.

Y in monograms

Y’s open arms and single stem make it a good centre letter. 𝓨 has a looping descender that can underline neighbouring initials. For the handwritten form, see the cursive Y lesson. To flip a name with a Y in it, the upside-down text generator uses ʎ and ⅄.