It's CU. Not UC.

A question often asked of many former Big Eight schools: Why is it the University of Colorado, but the moniker is CU and not UC? (The same applies at Kansas-KU, Missouri-MU, Nebraska-NU and Oklahoma-OU).

"Midwestern casualness," says CU historian Fred Casotti. It has always been this way at Colorado, for whatever reason, and at the other four listed above-but seemingly nowhere else in the USA.

In the 1950s, there was a concerted effort to eliminate the use of "CU" on the Boulder campus, both as a symbol and in speech, but Casotti said that no one would buy into it.

"Nobody would change," he said. "It's easier to say than U of C, UC sounds like slang or something (as in 'you see'), and it was traditional. By trying to eliminate it, they reinforced it."