W
W, or w, is the twenty-third letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is double-u, plural double-ues.
Name
The name “double-u” reflects stages in the letter’s evolution when it was considered two of the same letter, a double U.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 West Germanic languages, its name is monosyllabic: German We , Dutch wee . In Polish it is called wu . In many languages, its name literally means “double v”: Portuguese duplo vê, Spanish doble ve, French double vé, Icelandic tvöfalt vaff, Czech dvojité vé, Estonian kaksisvee, Finnish kaksois-vee, etc.
History
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".The sounds and of Classical Latin developed into the voiced bilabial fricative between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, no longer adequately represented the voiced labial-velar approximant sound of Germanic phonology.
The Germanic phoneme was, therefore, written as or by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German, in the 7th or 8th centuries. Gothic, 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, regained popularity; 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: both forms appear, for instance, in the "running text" of the Bayeux tapestry in proper names such as EDVVARDVS and VVILLELMVS. Another realisation 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.
Thus, the shift from the digraph to the distinct ligature was gradual and was 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. However, 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, the West Germanic phoneme became realized as ; this is why, today, the German represents that sound.
Use in writing systems
| Orthography | Phonemes |
| Cornish | , |
| Dutch | |
| English | |
| German | |
| Irish | |
| Indonesian | |
| Japanese | |
| Kashubian | |
| Kokborok | |
| Kurdish | |
| Low German | |
| Lower Sorbian | |
| North Frisian | |
| Old Prussian | |
| Polish | |
| Saterlandic | |
| Turkmen | |
| Upper Sorbian | |
| Walloon | |
| Welsh | , |
| West Frisian | , |
| Wymysorys | |
| Zhuang |
English
English uses to represent. There are also a number of words beginning with a written that is silent in most dialects before a , 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. represents a vowel sound,, in the word pwn, and in the Welsh loanwords cwm and crwth, it retains the Welsh pronunciation,. is also used in digraphs: , , , wherein it is usually an orthographic allograph of in final positions. 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 , 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/PCGN 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. The Classical Latin is heard in the Southern German greeting Servus.
In Dutch, became a labiodental approximant . In many Dutch-speaking areas, such as Flanders and Suriname, the pronunciation is used at all times.
In Finnish, is sometimes seen as a variant of and not a separate letter, but it is a part of the official alphabet. 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. The title of the first edition of the Kalevala was spelled Kalewala.
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. It is usually pronounced, but in some words of English origin, it may be pronounced. 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 is still commonly replaced by in speech. 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, the northern half uses it extensively in traditional dialect, and in multiple places in Sweden. It is used in southern Swedish; for example, the words "wesp" and "wann" are traditionally used in Halland. 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 is preserved. Thus, "warg" from Old Norse "vargr", but "åvå" from Old Norse "hafa".
In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages, is used mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed. In Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, is a non-syllabic variant of, spelled. In French, is also used mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed such as wagon or week''end, but in the first case it is pronounced and in the second. In most northern French dialects, the former turned finally to, but still exists as a remnant in the place-names of Romance Flanders, Picardie, Artois, Champagne, Romance Lorraine and sometimes elsewhere, and in the surnames from the same regions. Walloon as it sounds conserves the pronounced. The digraph is used to render in rare French words such as ouest "west" and to spell Arabic names transliterated -wi in English, but -oui in French. In all these languages, as in Scandinavian languages mentioned above, the letter is named "double v" though in Belgium the name is also used.
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 daburu, as an ideogram meaning "double". It is also used in internet slang to indicate laughter, derived from the word warau.
In Italian, while the letter is not considered part of the standard Italian alphabet, the character is often used in place of Viva, generally in the form in which the branches of the Vs cross in the middle, at least in handwriting. The same symbol written upside down indicates abbasso.
In the Kokborok language, represents the open-mid back rounded vowel.
In Turkey, the use of the was banned between 1928 and 2013 which was a problem for the Kurdish population in Turkey as the was a letter of the Kurdish alphabet. The use of the letter in the word Newroz, the Kurdish new year, was forbidden, and names which included the letter were not able to be used. In 2008, a court in Gaziantep reasoned the use of the letter would incite civil unrest.
In Vietnamese, is called vê đúp or vê kép, from the French double vé. 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, derived from the Vietnamese Telex input method that usually interpret a single "w" into Vietnamese character "ư".
"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".
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.