Uu: The Long Labial Vowel

Long uu is the sixth letter of the varnamala and the partner of short u, formed at the same place with the lips rounded and differing only in duration. Its vowel sign, like its partner's, hangs below the consonant rather than beside it, distinguished by an additional turn in the stroke; the two are easy to confuse in rapid handwriting and in small print, and distinguishing them is part of learning to read the script accurately. The independent form on this page is used only where the vowel opens a word.

With uu the varnamala completes its opening run of three vowel qualities in short and long pairs: a and aa in the throat, i and ii at the palate, u and uu at the lips. That symmetry is deliberate and is the clearest illustration of what the Sanskrit phoneticians were doing when they arranged the letters. Their order is not historical, not alphabetical in the Semitic sense of a fixed inherited sequence, and not a mnemonic; it is a table of the sounds of the language classified by how the mouth makes them, and it has been recognised since the nineteenth century as one of the earliest systematic phonetic analyses produced anywhere. Long uu is the least frequent of the six, but it appears in common vocabulary and in the lengthened stems of several noun and verb classes.