In the 10th century, Cyrillic script became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved.

Twenty-one letters represent consonants (б, в, г, ґ, д, ж, з, к, л, м, н, п, р, с, т, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ), ten represent vowels (а, е, є, и, і, ї, о, у, ю, я), and one represents a semivowel (й).

It also appears after labial consonants in some words, such as ім'я "name",[2] and it is retained in transliterations from the Latin alphabet: Кот-д'Івуар (Côte d'Ivoire) and О'Тул (O'Toole).

Some letters represent two phonemes: щ /ʃt͡ʃ/, ї /ji/ or /jɪ/, and є /jɛ/, ю /ju/, я /jɑ/ when they do not palatalize a preceding consonant.

It has retained the two early Cyrillic letters і (i) and izhe (и) to represent related sounds /i/ and /ɪ/ as well as the two historical forms e (е) and ye (є).

The early Cyrillic alphabet was brought to Kievan Rus' at the end of the first millennium, along with Christianity and the Old Church Slavonic language.

Various reforms of the alphabet by scholars of Church Slavonic, Ruthenian, and Russian languages caused the written and spoken word to diverge by varying amounts.

Etymological rules from Greek and South Slavic languages made the orthography imprecise and difficult to master.

The Civil Script eliminated some archaic letters (Ѯ, Ѱ, Ѡ, Ѧ), but reinforced an etymological basis for the alphabet, influencing Mykhailo Maksymovych's nineteenth-century Galician Maksymovychivka script for Ukrainian, and its descendant, the Pankevychivka, which is still in use, in a slightly modified form, for the Rusyn language in Carpathian Ruthenia.

In reaction to the hard-to-learn etymological alphabets, several reforms attempted to introduce a phonemic Ukrainian orthography during the nineteenth century, based on the example of Vuk Karadžić's Serbian Cyrillic.

In Dnieper Ukraine, proposed reforms suffered from periodic bans of publication and performance in the Ukrainian language.

It was officially recognized by the Council of People's Commissars in 1928, and by the Lviv Shevchenko Scientific Society in 1929, and adopted by the Ukrainian diaspora.

However, by 1930 Stalin's government started to reverse the Ukrainization policy, partly attributing the peasant resistance to collectivization to Ukrainian nationalists.

His reforms discredited and labelled "nationalist deviation", Skrypnyk committed suicide rather than face a show trial and execution or deportation.

The Ukrainian letter ge ґ,[5] and the phonetic combinations ль, льо, ля were eliminated, and Russian etymological forms were reintroduced (for example, the use of -іа- in place of -я-).

On 21 May 2019, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved a new version of the orthography prepared by the Ukrainian National Commission on Spelling.

Handwritten Cyrillic cursive letterforms vary somewhat from their corresponding printed (typeset) counterparts, particularly for the letters г, д, и, й, and т.

Quoted text is typically enclosed in unspaced French guillemets («angle-quotes»), or in lower and upper quotation marks as in German.

ISO 8859-5 encoding is missing the letter ґ. KOI8-U stands for Код обміну інформації 8 бітний — український, "Code for information interchange 8 bit — Ukrainian", analogous to "ASCII".