The letter Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled wye or occasionally wy (), plural wyes."Y" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "wy," op. cit. History The original ancestor of Y was the Semitic letter Waw, which was also the ultimate origin of the modern letters F, U, V, and W. See F for details. In Ancient Greek, ?????? (Upsilon) represented , then later on — close front rounded vowel. The Romans had already borrowed this as the letter V, to represent both the vowel as well as the consonant , but in later times, because the pronunciation of Ypsilon in Greek had shifted to , they borrowed it directly in its original form, stem and all, as Y — mainly to represent names and words tak