The letter Y in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. y is d plus dots 3 and 6, and like q it is identified mostly by how full it feels.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and Y is part of the family that starts with d. 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 Y on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. The full braille alphabet sets all ten families out side by side.

Where Y turns up in Grade 2

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

Writing a capital Y

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 Y 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 Y 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 Y, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.