The letter U in braille

How to recognise it

The third decade begins: u is a plus dots 3 and 6, so the bottom row is full and the top-left is raised. From here on, every cell has dot 6.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and U is part of the family that starts with a. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning U on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. The full braille alphabet sets all ten families out side by side.

Where U turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, U is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “us”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary u. That is the rule beginners trip on most: us is a single cell, but the u in a word like “up” is just a letter.

A contraction is one cell doing the work of two or more letters, which is why a Grade 2 page is roughly a quarter shorter than the same text in Grade 1. The complete Grade 2 reference lists all of them with the position rules that govern when they may be used.

Writing a capital U

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital U is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from U by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with U, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.