Ÿ


is a Latin script character composed of the letter and the diaeresis diacritical mark.

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 and in the surname of the house of Croÿ.

Hungarian

It occurs in a few Hungarian names as well, such as Lajos Méhelÿ and Margit Danÿ.

Tlingit

In Tlingit, 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

uses to transcribe the close central compressed vowel, 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.

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.
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 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, ISO 8859-15, and Unicode. This phenomenon also arose for the German eszett.