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,Pronounced  in formal situations, but colloquially often , ,  or , with a silent l.
plural double-ues."
W", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); 'W", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993) Merriam WebsterBrown & Kiddle (1870) The institutes of grammar, p. 19. <br>Double-ues is the plural of the name of the letter; the plural of the letter itself is written W's, Ws, w's, or ws.
History
right|thumb|A 1693 book printing that uses the "double u" alongside the modern letter; this was acceptable if printers did not have the letter in stock or the font had been made without it.
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  (spelled ) and  (spelled ) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative  between vowels in Early Medieval Latin.
Therefore,  no longer adequately represented the labial-velar approximant sound  of Germanic phonology.
The Germanic  phoneme was therefore written as  or  ( and  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.
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 / was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba.
It is from this  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  sound soon came to be represented by borrowing the rune , adapted as the Latin letter wynn: .
In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest,  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  whose rightmost branch curved around as in a cursive .
It was used up to the nineteenth century in Britain and continues to be familiar in Germany.Writing manuals that include it include Edward Cocker's The Pen's Triumph of 1658 and engravings of the roundhand calligraphy of Charles Snell and sometimes George Bickham.
See also Florian Hardwig's gallery of images of its use in the German-speaking countries.
The shift from the digraph  to the distinct ligature  is thus gradual, and is only apparent in abecedaria, explicit listings of all individual letters.
It was probably considered a separate letter by the 14th century in both Middle English and Middle German orthography, although it remained an outsider, not really considered part of the Latin alphabet proper, as expressed by Valentin Ickelshamer in the 16th century, who complained that:
In Middle High German (and possibly already in late Old High German), the West Germanic phoneme  became realized as ; this is why, today, the German  represents that sound.
Pronunciation and use
Pronunciations of Ww
English
English uses  to represent .
There are also a number of words beginning with a written  that is silent in most dialects before a (pronounced) , remaining from usage in Old English in which the  was pronounced: wreak, wrap, wreck, wrench, wroth, wrinkle, etc.
Certain dialects of Scottish English still distinguish this digraph.
In the Welsh loanwords cwm and crwth it retains the Welsh pronunciation, .
is also used in digraphs:  ,  ,  .
It is the fifteenth most frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 2.56% in words.
Other languages
In Europe languages with  in native words are in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland: English, German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Walloon, Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, Resian and Scandinavian dialects.
German, Polish, Wymysorys and Kashubian use it for the voiced labiodental fricative  (with Polish, related Kashubian and Wymysorys using Ł for ), and Dutch uses it for .
Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh and Cornish to represent the vowel  as well as the related approximant consonant .
The following languages historically used  for  in native words, but later replaced it by : Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian Łatynka and Belarusian Łacinka.
It is also used in modern systems of Romanization of Belarusian for the letter , for example in the BGN/PCGNBelarusian romanization (June 2019) (publishing.service.gov.uk) system, in contrast to the letter , which is used in the Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script.
In Swedish and Finnish, traces of this old usage may still be found in proper names.
In Hungarian remains in some aristocratic surnames, e.g. Wesselényi.
Modern German dialects generally have only  or  for West Germanic , but  or  is still heard allophonically for , especially in the clusters , , and .
Some Bavarian dialects preserve a "light" initial , such as in wuoz (Standard German weiß  '[I] know').
The Classical Latin  is heard in the Southern German greeting Servus ('hello' or 'goodbye').
In Dutch,  became a labiodental approximant  (with the exception of words with -, which have , or other diphthongs containing -).
In many Dutch-speaking areas, such as Flanders and Suriname, the  pronunciation is used at all times.
In Finnish,  is seen as a variant of  and not a separate letter.
It is, however, recognized 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 .
In Danish, Norwegian and Swedish,  is named double-v and not double-u.
In these 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 , but in some words of English origin it may be pronounced ., page 1098 The letter was officially introduced in the Danish and Swedish alphabets as late as 1980 and 2006, respectively, despite having been in use for much longer.
It had been recognized since the conception of modern Norwegian, with the earliest official orthography rules of 1907.
was earlier seen as a variant of , and  as a letter (double-v) is still commonly replaced by  in speech (e.g. WC being pronounced as VC, www as VVV, WHO as VHO, etc.)
The two letters were sorted as equals before  was officially recognized, and that practice is still recommended when sorting names in Sweden.
In modern slang, some native speakers may pronounce  more closely to the origin of the loanword than the official  pronunciation.
Multiple dialects of Swedish and Danish use the sound however.
In Denmark notably in Jutland, where the northern half use it extensively in traditional dialect, and multiple places in Sweden.
It is used in southern Swedish, for example in Halland where the words "wesp" (wisp) and "wann" (water) are traditionally used.
In northern and western Sweden there are also dialects with .
Elfdalian is a good example, which is one of many dialects where the Old Norse difference between v () and f ( or ) is preserved.
Thus "warg" from Old Norse "vargr", but "åvå" from Old Norse "hafa".
In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages (excepting far northern French and Walloon),  is used mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed (le week-end, il watt, el kiwi).
The digraph  is used for  in native French words;  is  or .
In Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese,  is a non-syllabic variant of , spelled .
In Indonesian, the letter "W" is called 'wé'.
The letter names in Indonesian are always the same with the sounds they produce, especially the consonants.
The Japanese language uses "W", pronounced , as an ideogram meaning "double".
It is also a short form of an Internet slang term for "www", used to denote laughter, which is derived from the word warau (笑う, meaning "to laugh").
Variations of this slang include kusa (草, meaning "grass"), which have originated from how repeated instances of "www" look like blades of grass.
In Italian, while the letter  is not considered part of the standard Italian alphabet, the character is often used in place of Viva (hooray for...), generally in the form in which the branches of the Vs cross in the middle, at least in handwriting (in fact it could be considered a monogram).
The same symbol written upside down indicates abbasso (down with...).
In the Kokborok language,  represents the open-mid back rounded vowel .
In Vietnamese,  is called , from the French .
It is not included in the standard Vietnamese alphabet, but it is often used as a substitute for qu- in literary dialect and very informal writing.
It's also commonly used for abbreviating Ư in formal documents, for example Trung Ương is abbreviated as TW even in official documents and document ID number
"W" is the 24th letter in the Modern Filipino Alphabet and has its English name.
However, in the old Filipino alphabet, Abakada, it was the 19th letter and had the name "wah"."
W, w, pronounced: wah".
English, Leo James Tagalog-English Dictionary.
1990., page 1556.
In Washo, lower-case  represents a typical  sound, while upper-case  represents a voiceless w sound, like the difference between English weather and whether for those who maintain the distinction.
Under the 2020 version of amendment of Kazakh alphabets by president Tokayev, the W has selected as replacement of Cyrillic У, and represents one of ,  and/or .
Other systems
In the International Phonetic Alphabet,  is used for the voiced labial-velar approximant.
Other uses
thumb|This cursive 'w' was popular in calligraphy of the eighteenth century; a late appearance in a font of c. 1816.
W is the symbol for the chemical element tungsten, after its German (and alternative English) name, Wolfram.
It is also the SI symbol for the watt, the standard unit of power.
It is also often used as a variable in mathematics, especially to represent a complex number or a vector.
Name
Double-u, whose name reflects stages in the letter's evolution when it was considered two of the same letter, a double U, is the only modern English letter whose name has more than one syllable.However, "Izzard" was formerly a two-syllable pronunciation of the letter Z. It is also the only English letter whose name is not pronounced with any of the sounds that the letter typically makes in words, with the exception of H for some speakers.
Some speakers shorten the name "double u" into "dub-u" or just "dub"; for example, University of Wisconsin, University of Washington, University of Wyoming, University of Waterloo, University of the Western Cape and University of Western Australia are all known colloquially as "U Dub", and the automobile company Volkswagen, abbreviated "VW", is sometimes pronounced "V-Dub".
The fact that many website URLs require a "www."
prefix has been influential in promoting these shortened pronunciations.
In other Germanic languages, including German (but not Dutch, in which it is pronounced wé), its name is similar to that of English V.
In many languages, its name literally means "double v": Portuguese duplo vê,In Brazilian Portuguese, it is dáblio, which is a loanword from the English double-u.
Spanish doble ve (though it can be spelled uve doble),In Latin American Spanish, it is doble ve, similar regional variations exist in other Spanish-speaking countries.
French double vé, Icelandic tvöfalt vaff, Czech dvojité vé, Estonian kaksisvee, Finnish kaksois-vee, etc.
Former U.S. president George W. Bush was given the nickname "Dubya" after the colloquial pronunciation of his middle initial in Texas, where he spent much of his childhood.
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
𐤅: Semitic letter Waw, from which the following symbols originally derive
U : Latin letter U
V : Latin letter V
Ⱳ ⱳ : W with hook
Ꝡ ꝡ : Latin letter VY
Ꟃ ꟃ : Anglicana W, used in medieval English and Cornish
IPA-specific symbols related to W:
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to W:  and
ʷ : Modifier letter small w is used in Indo-European studies
ꭩ : Modifier letter small turned w is used in linguistic transcriptions of Scots
W with diacritics: Ẃ ẃ Ẁ ẁ Ŵ ŵ Ẅ ẅ Ẇ ẇ Ẉ ẉ ẘ
װ (double vav): the Yiddish and Hebrew equivalent of W
Ligatures and abbreviations
₩ : Won sign, capital letter W with double stroke
Computing codes
1
Other representations
See also
Digamma (Ϝ), the archaic Greek letter for /w/
Voiced labio-velar approximant
Wh (digraph)
W stands for Work in physics
W is the symbol for "watt" in the International System of Units (SI)
References
Informational notes
Citations External links
