Bopomofo Letter U

It marks the Mandarin “u” sound in Zhuyin. Each symbol is a sound piece: ㄨ can form a syllable on its own, or sit between other pieces, as in ㄌㄨㄢ, where it is the middle sound.

Zhuyin grew out of efforts to write down Chinese pronunciation and support literacy. The reform trail includes Lu Zhuangzhang’s 1892 New Phonetic Alphabet proposal. A pronunciation commission organized the system in 1913, and it was released in 1918.

Zhuyin symbols draw on Chinese-character forms. One published origin table traces ㄨ to 㐅, an older form of 五. Pinyin, developed in China in the 1950s, is a later system that uses Roman letters. Both can represent Mandarin syllables, but they use different symbols.

What does ㄨ signal in online writing?

In a mixed Taiwan-based message, it may be part of Zhuyin Wen. This style replaces some or all Chinese characters with Zhuyin. A 2003 study of Taipei college BBSs found that readers could take the style as playful or cute, while others criticized it as childish, informal, or a sign of weak Chinese-character literacy. Those reactions concern the writing style, not a separate meaning of ㄨ.

Read ㄨ with the symbols around it: alone, it does not identify a particular character or tone. A typeface may change its strokes or proportions, but the character remains the same.