- In Latin, the letter Y was called I graeca ("Greek I") because the sound the equivalent letter in the Greek alphabet (Upsilon) wasn't one that Latin speakers generally used, so they only used it to spell foreign words.
- The word for Y in Romance langauges - i greca in Italian and i grec in French - derives from this. Other languages have taken the original Greek name for the letter. In German it's Ypsilon, and in Icelandic, ufsilon i. In Faroese, Y is called seinna i ("later i") because of its later place in the alphabet.
- The shape of the letter Y derives from the Greek letter upsilon.
- It's also related to the Semitic letter waw.
- Y is the chemical symbol for the element yttrium, a silvery metal used in the production of electrodes, electrolytes, electronic filters, lasers and superconductors.
- In the early days of printing, a character for "th" didn't exist in European typefaces as it's not a sound which was used in other languages. Caxton and other English printers used Y as a substitute which is why we get "Ye Olde Shoppe" as a joke old fashioned name. "Ye" would have been pronounced "the", however.
- In the NATO phonetic alphabet, Y is "Yankee".
- "The Y" is a nickname for The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and also The Young Women's Christian Association, The Young Men's Hebrew Association and The Young Women's Hebrew Association.
- The German language only used Y in foreign words and names, so on a German Typewriter/computer keyboard, the Y key and the Z key have swapped positions.
- Y is commonly used in mathematics to denote a variable or one of the axes of a graph.
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