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'Yery' (Ы, ы) is a letter in the
Cyrillic alphabet. It represents the phoneme after non-palatalized (hard) consonants in the
Belarusian,
Rusyn and
Russian alphabets. Because of phonological processes, the actual realization of after hard consonants is retracted to a
close central unrounded vowel (
IPA ).
Like many Cyrillic letters, originally the letter yery was formed from a ligature—between
Yer ÑŠ and I (then Ñ–, dotless or with two dots) or
Izhe (then н, now и). In ancient manuscripts, it is almost without exception found as ъі or ън. Once the letters ъ and ь subsequently lost their values as vowels from the
Slavonic language, the current form Ñ‹ evolved.

The letter Yery in several fonts
The letter Ñ‹ is usually transcribed in
English and most other West-European languages as ''y'', e.g.
Krylov (Russian last name Крылов). See
Romanization of Russian.
The yery is theoretically never capitalized because no words start with it, but Cyrillic type faces do normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in
all caps. Furthermore there are several proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin (including some geographical names in
Russia) with a beginning ы, е.g. Ытык-Кюёль (
Ytyk-Kyuyol), Ыгыатта (
Ygyatta), a village and a river in
Sakha (Yakutia) Republic respectively, Ыльчи Мундок (
Eulji Mundeok), a Korean military leader.
Yery is no longer found in the Ukrainian alphabet, however a similar sound exists, represented by the letter
И.