General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

V

V (lowercase v) is the twenty-second letter of the modern English alphabet and the twentieth of the ancient Roman alphabet¹. For most of its history it was not a separate letter at all: it was one of the shapes of the letter U, and the two forms were used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant until printers separated them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries²^•³. In English today V stands for the voiced labio-dental fricative, the voiced counterpart of F².

Key fact	Detail
Alphabet position	22nd letter of the modern English alphabet, 20th of the ancient Roman alphabet¹
Original identity	One of the earlier forms of U; in Latin the same symbol served as both vowel and consonant²
English sound	A voiced labio-dental spirant, with the breath escaping between the lower lip and the upper teeth; the voiced form of F²
German sound	V has the value of F, while W takes the value English gives to V²
Split from U	Distinguished in Italian printing by 1524, generally from 1559–60; general in English by 1630³
Native English words	Apart from southern dialect forms such as vat and vixen, English words beginning with V are of foreign, mostly Latin, origin²
Encoding	U+0056 (V) and U+0076 (v) in the Basic Latin block; lowercase v is decimal 118 in ASCII and UTF-8⁴

Origin in the Latin alphabet

The Roman alphabet took its letter from an early Greek vowel symbol, the same source that later produced U and Y¹. In classical Latin the single pointed glyph served three values: the vowel u (short and long) and the consonant, which classical grammarians treated as "consonantal u" and which Allen and Greenough describe as having the sound of English w⁵. The letter was also employed in Latin with the value of the Greek digamma, that is w, to which it corresponds etymologically¹.

The consonant sound changed over time. When the earliest Latin loanwords entered the Germanic languages, the letter still denoted a w-like sound, which is why words that later began with v appear in Old English with w. Under the Empire the semivocalic sound gradually became a bilabial consonant and finally the labio-dental voiced spirant that the letter denotes in English today. This development did not take place in Old English, where no v sound, bilabial or labio-dental, occurred at the beginning of a word, although the sound was common in other positions, there written f¹.

One letter, two shapes

Through the Middle Ages u and v were graphic variants of a single letter, chosen by position rather than sound. In Middle English the general tendency was to write v initially and u elsewhere, regardless of whether the sound was vocalic or consonantal: vnder, vpon, vse, but also cure, full, huge, and vain, vice, vile beside saue, euer, giuen. For clarity scribes often preferred v next to n and m, as in tvne and rovnd³. In some northern Middle English manuscripts and many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish texts, v and w were also written for each other; these were purely graphic interchanges, not phonetic ones¹.

The standard Latin alphabet contained 23 letters until the early seventeenth century, and u and v counted as letterforms of one letter, as i and j did of another; w was not part of the standard alphabet at all. A printer's choice between the u and v letterforms depended on a word's placement and on national and regional convention. In capitals there was only one form, V, whose Gothic shape resembled a modern U⁶.

The printing-press split. Continental printers began assigning the rounded form to the vowel and the pointed form to the consonant during the sixteenth century. The distinction appears in Italian printing as early as 1524, in Trissino's Epistola de la vita che dee tenere una Donna vedova, and its general introduction dates from 1559–60 with the Grammatica of Ramus, an innovation apparently due to the printer rather than the author³^•⁷. English printing made several attempts before 1600; after 1600 the distinction spread quickly and had become general by 1630. Capital V kept its old double function longer, and the capital vowel U, used from at least 1625, displaced it only toward the close of the seventeenth century. From about 1700 the regular forms have been U u for the vowel and V v for the consonant³. Even after the split, some dictionaries and catalogs continued to mingle U and V words as a single alphabetical series into the nineteenth century, as they also did with I and J⁸.

Sound values across languages

In English, V is a voiced labio-dental fricative: the breath escapes through a narrow slit between the lower lip and the upper teeth, with the vocal cords vibrating, exactly the voiced counterpart of F². The two sounds differ only in voicing, and that difference alone carries meaning in pairs such as feel and veal⁹.

German assigns the letter differently. There V is generally pronounced [f], the voiceless sound, while W carries the [v] sound that English writes with V². Within German spelling the letter follows regular rules: it is read [f] at the beginning of a word or syllable when a vowel (Vogel) or l or r (Vlies) follows, and always [f] at the end of a word or syllable (aktiv, Bravheit) because of final devoicing, which affects all voiced-voiceless pairs in the language. It is read [v] mainly in words adopted into German before a vowel, such as Klavier, Virus, and Travemünde¹⁰.

The letter's frequency in German has declined over the centuries: in Old and Middle High German many words now written with B were spelled with V, forms such as aver, haven, and heven recorded in the Grimms' Deutsches Wörterbuch. The letter nonetheless remains in the alphabet, and in minimal pairs such as viel and fiel, where the sounds are identical, the graphic difference between V and F alone distinguishes the meanings¹¹.

V in English vocabulary

Old English had no initial v sound, so early English scribes wrote the [v] sound, when it occurred between vowels, with f: lufa for love, drífan for drive¹^•¹². The few native words that now begin with v, such as vat and vixen, come from a habit in southwestern England of voicing initial f to v; vat stands for fat or wine-fat, a form that survives in the English Bible, and vixen is the feminine of fox²^•⁸. Every other English word beginning with the letter is borrowed, most of them from Latin².

The letter in writing systems and symbols

In computing, V occupies two code points in the Basic Latin block, which matches ASCII: U+0056 for the capital and U+0076 for the lowercase, the latter with decimal value 118 and the single UTF-8 byte 76⁴. The Gothic alphabet of the Middle Ages did distinguish the two shapes graphically, using a rune for the u value and the Greek-derived letter for the v value, but Latin script itself made no such distinction until the printers did¹¹.

Beyond the alphabet, V serves as the Roman numeral for five, used in Middle English for the ordinal number before Arabic numerals arrived. Its shape named the V-engine, attested from 1909, the V-eight engine type from 1929, and the V-neck in clothing by 1879⁸. The V-for-victory hand sign was conceived in January 1941 by the Belgian politician and resistance leader Victor de Laveleye, standing for French victoire and Flemish vrijheid (freedom); broadcast into Europe by Radio België and Radio Belgique, it was popularized by the BBC by June 1941 and became a widespread allied gesture during the Second World War⁸.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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