W

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This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see W (disambi
guation).
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W
ISO basic
Latin alphabet
Aa
Bb
Cc
Dd
Ee
Ff
Gg
Hh
Ii
Jj
Kk
Ll
Mm
Nn
Oo
Pp
Qq
Rr
Ss
Tt
Uu
Vv
Ww
Xx
Yy
Zz
v t e
Cursive.svg
Circle sheer blue 29.png
Circle sheer blue 29.png
Cursive script 'w' and capital 'W'
W cursiva.gif
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ific problem is: unify (or explain) spellings like "phoneme /w/ became realized
as [v]", "The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ?VV?", "words beginn
ing with a W".. Please help improve this article if you can. (June 2014)
W (named double-u,[note 1] plural double-ues[1][2]) is the 23rd letter in the IS
O basic Latin alphabet.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Usage
3 Name
4 Computing codes
5 Other representations
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 External links
History[edit]
A 1693 book printing that uses the "double u" alongside the modern letter
The sounds /w/ (spelled ?V?) and /b/ (spelled ?B?) of Classical Latin developed
into a bilabial fricative // between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, ?
V? no longer represented adequately the labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Ge
rmanic phonology.
The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ?VV? or ?uu? (?u? and ?v? beco
ming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the 7th or 8th century by the
earliest writers of Old English and Old High German.[3] Gothic (not Latin-based)
, by contrast, simply used a letter based on the Greek ? for the same sound. 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 digrap
h was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German, but only sporadically in
Old English, where the /w/ sound was usually represented by the runic ??? wynn.

In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ?uu? gaine
d popularity and by 1300 it had taken wynn's place in common use.
Scribal realization of the digraph could look like a pair of Vs whose branches c
rossed in the middle. An obsolete, cursive form found in the nineteenth century
in both English and German was in the form of an en whose rightmost branch curve
d around as in a cursive vee.[citation needed]
The shift from the digraph ?VV? to the distinct ligature ?W? is thus gradual, an
d is only apparent in abecedaria, explicit listings of all individual letters. I
t was probably considered a separate letter by the 14th century in both Middle E
nglish and Middle German orthography, although it remained an outsider not reall
y considered part of the Latin alphabet proper, as expressed by Valentin Ickelsh
amer in the 16th century, who complained that
Poor w is so infamous and unknown that many barely know either its name or its s
hape, not those who aspire to being Latinists, as they have no need of it, nor d
o the Germans, not even the schoolmasters, know what to do with it or how to cal
l it; some call it we, [... others] call it uu, [...] the Swabians call it auwaw
au[4]
In Middle High German (and possibly already in late Old High German), the West G
ermanic phoneme /w/ became realized as [v]; this is why the German ?w? today rep
resents that sound. There is no phonological distinction between [w] and [v] in
contemporary German. Modern German dialects generally have only [v] or [?] for W
est Germanic /w/, but [w] or [?] remains heard allophonically for w, especially i
n the clusters ?schw?, ?zw?, and ?qu?. Some Bavarian dialects preserve a "light"
initial [w] in words like wuoz (Standard German wei [va?s] '[I] know'). The Clas
sical Latin [] is heard in the Southern German greeting Servus ('hello' or 'goodb
ye').
In Dutch, it became a labiodental approximant /?/ (with the exception of words w
ith -?eeuw?, which have /e?/, or other diphthongs containing -?uw?). In many Dutc
h speaking areas, such as Flanders and Suriname, the // pronunciation is used at
all times.
Usage[edit]
In Europe, there are only a few languages that use W in native words and all are
located in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland. English
, German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Walloon, Polish, K
ashubian, Sorbian and Resian use W in native words. English uses W to represent
/w/, German, Polish and Kashubian use it for the voiced labiodental fricative /v
/ (with Polish and related Kashubian using L for /w/), and Dutch uses it for /w/
or /?/. Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh and Corn
ish to represent the vowel /u/ as well as the related approximant consonant /w/.
English also contains a number of words beginning with a W that is silent in mo
st dialects before a (pronounced) R, remaining from usage in Anglo-Saxon in whic
h the W was pronounced: wreak, wrap, wreck, wrench, wroth, wrinkle, etc. (Certai
n dialects of Scottish English still distinguish this digraph.)
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /w/ is used for the voiced labial-velar
approximant, probably based on English.
In Finnish, ?W? is seen as a variant of ?V? and not a separate letter. It is how
ever recognised and maintained in the spelling of some old names, reflecting an
earlier German spelling standard, and in some modern loan words. In all cases it
is pronounced /v/.
In Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, ?W? is named double-v and not double-u. In the
se languages, the letter only exists in old names, loanwords and foreign words.

(Foreign words are distinguished from loanwords by having a significantly lower

level of integration in the language.) It is usually pronounced /v/, but in some
words of English origin it may be pronounced /w/.[5][6] The letter was official
ly introduced in the Danish and Swedish alphabets as late as 1980 and 2006, resp
ectively, despite having been in use for much longer. It was recognized since th
e conception of modern Norwegian, with the earliest official orthography rules o
f 1907.[7] ?W? was earlier seen as a variant of ?V?, and ?W? as a letter (double
-v) is still commonly replaced by ?V? in speech (e.g. WC being pronounced as VC,
www as VVV, WHO as VHO, etc.) The two letters were sorted as equals before ?W?
was officially recognized, and that practice is still recommended when sorting n
ames in Sweden.[8] In modern slang, some native speakers may pronounce ?W? more
closely to the origin of the loanword than the official /v/ pronunciation.
In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages (excepting far northern French
and Walloon), W is used mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed (le
week-end, il watt, el kiwi). The digraph 'ou' is used for /w/ in native French
words; 'oi' is /wa/ or /w?/, 'oin' is /w?~/. In Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
, [w] is a non-syllabic variant of /u/, spelled U (with a diaeresis in the Spani
sh combinations 'ge' and 'gi').
In the Cyrillic alphabet used for the Belarusian language, ??? is pronounced lik
e English /w/.
The Japanese language uses "W", pronounced /daburu/, as an ideogram meaning "dou
ble".[9]
In Arabic, "W" is transliterated using the penultimate letter of the alphabet, ?
(waw).
In Italian, while the letter "W" is not considered part of the standard Italian
alphabet, the character is often used in place of Viva (hooray for...), while th
e same symbol written upside down indicates abbasso (down with...).
In Vietnamese, W is called v dp, from the French double v. It is not included in th
e standard Vietnamese alphabet, but it is often used as a substitute for qu- in
literary dialect and very informal writing.[10][11]
W is also the symbol for the chemical element tungsten, after its German name, W
olfram.
Name[edit]
"Double U" is the only English letter name with more than one syllable, except f
or the occasionally used, though somewhat archaic,
(its name is pronounced simil
ar to ethel), the formerly common in print &, ampersand, and the archaic pronunc
iation of Z, izzard. The initialism "www" for the World Wide Web thus, perhaps i
ronically, has three times as many syllables as the full name.
Some speakers therefore shorten the name "double u" into "dub" only; for example
, University of Wisconsin, University of Washington, University of Wyoming, Univ
ersity of Waterloo, and University of Western Australia are all known colloquial
ly as "U Dub", and the automobile company Volkswagen, abbreviated "VW", is somet
imes pronounced "V-Dub".[12] The fact that many website URLs still require a "ww
w." prefix has likewise given rise to a shortened version of the original, three
-syllable pronunciation. With the arguable exception of the letter H, W is curre
ntly the only English letter whose name is not pronounced with any of the sounds
that the letter typically makes. Many others, however, pronounce the "w" as dub
-u, reducing it to two syllables. For example, "www" would be six syllables rath
er than nine, being pronounced, dub-u dub-u dub-u.
In other Germanic languages, including German, its name is similar to that of En

glish V.[13] In many languages, its name literally means "double v": Spanish dob
le ve (though it can be spelled uve doble),[14][note 2] French double v, Icelandi
c tvfalt vaff, Czech dvojit v, Finnish kaksois-vee, etc.
George W. Bush has been given the nickname "Dubya", after the colloquial pronunc
iation of the name of "W" in Texas.
Computing codes[edit]
Character
W
w
Unicode name
latin capital letter w
latin small letter w
Encodings
decimal hex
decimal hex
Unicode 87
U+0057 119
U+0077
UTF-8 87
57
119
77
Numeric character reference
W W w w
EBCDIC family 230
E6
166
A6
ASCII 1 87
57
119
77
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Ma
cintosh families of encodings.
Other representations[edit]
NATO phonetic Morse code
Whiskey
ICS Whiskey.svg Semaphore Whiskey.svg ?
Signal flag
Flag semaphore Braille
dots-2456
See also[edit]