Ou (ligature)

This omicron-upsilon ligature is still seen today on icon artwork in Greek Orthodox churches, and sometimes in graffiti or other forms of informal or decorative writing.

The ligature is now mostly used in the context of the Latin alphabet, interpreted as a ligature of Latin o and u: for example, in the orthography of the Wyandot language and of Algonquian languages e.g. in Western Abenaki to represent /ɔ̃/, and in Algonquin to represent /w/, /o/ or /oː/.

The ligature, in both majuscule and minuscule forms, is occasionally used to represent minuscule of "У" in the Romanian transitional alphabet, as the glyph for monograph Uk (ꙋ) is rarely available in font sets.

The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses U+1D15 ᴕ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL OU and U+1D3D ᴽ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL OU[1] to indicate a back vowel of unknown quality.

In Unicode, it is encoded for use in Latin as "Latin Capital Letter OU" (U+0222 Ȣ) and "Latin Small Letter OU" (U+0223, ȣ) in the Latin Extended-B range,[2][3] and for use in Cyrillic as Cyrillic letter monograph Uk (uppercase U+A64A, Ꙋ, lowercase U+A64B, ꙋ), in addition to now deprecated "Cyrillic letter Uk" (uppercase U+0478, Ѹ, lowercase U+0479, ѹ), which may be realized with the "о" and "у" either side by side or combined vertically.