is a Latin script character composed of the letter and the diaeresis diacritical mark. (An uppercase form, Ÿ, has a codepoint in some coding schemes (including Unicode) but is not known to be used in any orthography.)
Usage
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 . As with other French vowels with a diaresis, the indicates the second of two vowels in hiatus.
It occurs in a few Hungarian proper nouns as well, such as Lajos Méhelÿ and Margit Danÿ. It also functions as a diaresis, but shows that the is pronounced as separate instead of being the second letter in the Hungarian digraphs , , and .
In Tlingit, represented the sound , but is not used today as the sound has merged with and .
In Paunaka, this letter represents the vowel .
The Cocama language also uses this letter.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses to transcribe the close central compressed vowel, a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages.
The character has also found use as a gratuitous metal umlaut, notably for the metal band Queensrÿche.
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 . References