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.

D, N and Y: one shape

Y is D with dots 3 and 6 added; with dot 3 alone, D is N.

Where Y turns up in Grade 2

Standing alone, Y is the word “you”. Inside a word it is the letter again: “yak” is ⠽⠁⠅.

Writing a capital Y

Capital Y is two cells: the capital sign, dot 6, then Y. A word in capitals takes the sign twice, once for the whole word: “YAK” is ⠠⠠⠽⠁⠅. Capitals covers longer runs.

Easily confused with

Y differs by a single dot from N, X and Z — the letters to drill it against.

Practice words

Words that start with Y, one cell per letter in Grade 1. Where Grade 2 writes one shorter, that form follows.

In a whole book

In a count over the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the letter y is printed 2,262 times. Grade 2 still writes it as its own cell 1,560 times, 69.0%. The other 702 are inside contractions, most often “you” (396), “very” (130), “your” (55) and “day” (38).

The cell itself is written 2,054 times in the Grade 2 text: 1,560 as the letter, 396 as the word “you”, 73 inside shortforms and 25 as the second cell of a two-cell contraction.