Hiragana Letter Yu

The Hiragana Letter Yu at U+3086 represents the Japanese mora yu and is part of the Hiragana block, the main phonetic syllabary used for native Japanese grammar and many everyday words. It is read with a consonant-plus-vowel sound similar to “you” without the final glide becoming a separate syllable. In Japanese text, it appears in words such as ゆめ for “dream,” ゆき for “snow,” and ゆび for “finger.” Hiragana is also used for grammatical endings, particles, children’s books, language learning materials, and words whose kanji are uncommon or intentionally avoided. A smaller related form, ゅ, combines with preceding kana to write palatalized sounds, as in きゅ for kyu and しゅ for shu; the full-size ゆ is different and counts as its own mora. In romanized Japanese it is normally written yu, and in kana ordering it belongs to the ya-row sequence や, ゆ, よ.