W
W, or w, is the twenty-third and fourth-to-last letter of the modern English and ISO basic Latin alphabets. It usually represents a consonant, but in some languages it represents a vowel. Its name in English is double-u,[note 1] plural double-ues.[1][2]
The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W' character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").
The sounds /w/ (spelled ⟨V⟩) and /b/ (spelled ⟨B⟩) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative /β/ between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, ⟨V⟩ no longer adequately represented the labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology.
The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ (⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German, in the 7th or 8th centuries.[3] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, had simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ for the same sound in the 4th century. The digraph ⟨VV⟩/⟨uu⟩ was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba.
It is from this ⟨uu⟩ digraph that the modern name "double U" derives. The digraph was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German, but only in the earliest texts in Old English, where the /w/ sound soon came to be represented by borrowing the rune ⟨ᚹ⟩, adapted as the Latin letter wynn: ⟨ƿ⟩. In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ gained popularity again and by 1300 it had taken wynn's place in common use.
Scribal realisation of the digraph could look like a pair of Vs whose branches crossed in the middle. Another, common in roundhand, kurrent and blackletter, takes the form of an ⟨n⟩ whose rightmost branch curved around as in a cursive ⟨v⟩.[4][5] It was used up to the nineteenth century in Britain and continues to be familiar in Germany.[note 2]
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