# W
**W** (lowercase **w**) is the twenty-third letter of the modern [Latin alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/latin-alphabet) as used for English, where its conventional name is "double-u". It is the only letter of the [English alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/english-alphabet) whose name has more than one syllable, and it originated not in the classical Latin alphabet but as a medieval doubling of the letters U and V to write a sound Latin did not have.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) • [2](https://en.alegsaonline.com/art/132689)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Position and name | 23rd letter of the English alphabet; named "double-u", the only English letter name with three syllables[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) • [2](https://en.alegsaonline.com/art/132689) |
| Origin | A ligature of two U's or V's, representing the consonant sound /w/, which classical Latin wrote with the same letter V as the vowel u[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) |
| Old English rival | The runic letter wynn (ƿ) was preferred for English from the 8th century; the ligatured w replaced it by about 1300[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) |
| Unicode encoding | U+0057 (W) and U+0077 (w) in the Basic Latin block; ASCII decimal 87, hexadecimal 0x57; added in Unicode version 1.1[3](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0057) |
| Fullwidth variant | U+FF37 (Ｗ) and U+FF57 (ｗ) in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block, with compatibility decomposition to the plain letters[4](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2Bff57) |
| English sound value | Normally a voiced bilabial semivowel, /w/, produced by rounding and then opening the lips before a full vowel[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) |
| Cross-language values | German w has the value of English v; Welsh uses w both as a consonant and as a vowel[5](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W) |
## Origin and early history
The Romans used the letter V, not distinguished from U, to represent the phoneme /w/.[16](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/tr/grammar/latin/classification-sounds) Their letter V carried both the vowel value of u and the consonant value, so when the Latin alphabet was first applied to English, a Germanic language, in the 7th century, scribes had to improvise. They first wrote uu for /w/, but from the 8th century English scribes commonly preferred the runic symbol wynn (ƿ), borrowed from the futhorc (the runic alphabet from which wynn was borrowed) alphabet.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) • [6](https://our-languages.canada.ca/en/blogue-blog/the-letter-w-eng)
On the continent, the doubling solution won out. Scribes writing Germanic vernaculars in the Latin alphabet repeated the letter U, or its angular twin V, writing uu or vv; the practice appears to have originated in what is now Germany.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) • [7](https://medievalwritings.atillo.com.au/scripts/letters/historyw.htm) After the [Norman Conquest](https://www.edgepedia.org/norman-conquest) of 1066, Norman scribes introduced the ligatured form w to England, and by 1300 it had replaced wynn.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) The 1911 *Encyclopædia Britannica* records that in 9th-century English the uu of the old texts was found not to represent the sound satisfactorily, that the runic þ was briefly adopted for some uses, and that uu (with vv only in Early Middle English) and then w became general again well before wynn died out.[5](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W)
The letter's name preserves this history. Because V had the vowel value of u when the doubling was devised, the new sign was called "double u", even though its printed form looks like a double v; the [French name](https://www.edgepedia.org/french-name) double-v makes the same double reading from the other side.[5](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W) • [1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) The letter was probably regarded as a single letter very early, but it never lost its original name.[8](https://wehd.com/102/W.html)
## Printing history
**Type founding shaped the letter's spread.** The earliest English printers had a w in their type, but French printers did not, so the Roman Catholic New Testament printed at Rheims in 1582 set w as two v's side by side.[5](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W) The problem was chronic in vernacular printing: most early printing was in Latin, and stocks of W and w in roman type were scanty and frequently exhausted when compositors set Dutch, English, or German text. When that happened, compositors either substituted VV or vv, or permanently altered V or v type pieces by filing or shaving a serif so the two pieces would sit closely together and resemble a w; in early German texts a curved r followed by a v sometimes served instead.[9](https://www.itsmarc.com/crs/mergedprojects/rarebks/rarebks/appendix_g5._letter_w.htm) Seventeenth-century Dutch and Latin title pages regularly show vv standing in for w, as in "VVilhelm" for Wilhelm.[10](https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/miracles-lately-vvrovght-the-use-of-vv-for-w-in-17th-century-titles/)
## Sound and spelling in English
In English, w normally represents a voiced bilabial semivowel, produced by rounding and then opening the lips before a full vowel. The sound has remained essentially the consonantal u throughout the history of the language.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w) • [5](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W)
The letter also participates in several spelling patterns that the pronunciation does not simply follow:
- In the digraphs aw, ew, and ow, w alternates with u after a, e, and o, with the w forms preferred syllable-finally (law, dew, cow). In some words the digraph has a non-standard value, as in sew, knowledge, and low; final -ow with the non-standard value, as in low, occurs in nearly four times as many words as the standard value in how.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w)
- The word-initial digraph wh once had a voiceless, aspirated pronunciation /hw/, still heard in Scottish, Irish, and often [American English](https://www.edgepedia.org/american-english) and among some RP speakers, in words such as whale, which, and whether. [Old English](https://www.edgepedia.org/old-english) mostly spelled these forms hw.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w)
- Initial w fell silent before r in the 17th century but remains written in wr- words such as wrap, write, and wrong. It is silent in two, who, and whose, in answer and sword, and in place names such as Norwich and [Southwark](https://www.edgepedia.org/southwark).[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w)
- Final w in many disyllables, such as gallows, follow, and sorrow, evolved from the Old English letter yogh (ʒ), which stood for g.[1](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w)
## W in other languages
Languages assign the letter different values. In German, w has the value of English v, while the German letter v (named Vau) is used with the value of f; the same symbol is accordingly called "Vey" in German.[5](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W) In Welsh, w serves both as a consonant and as a vowel, and the circumflexed forms Ŵ and ŵ belong to the Welsh orthography.[11](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0174) Many languages that use the Latin alphabet, including most [Romance languages](https://www.edgepedia.org/romance-languages), do not use w as a native letter at all.[12](https://www.divinityatlas.com/alphabet-letters/unnamed-23)
## W in Unicode and computing
The capital and lowercase W occupy fixed places in the oldest layer of the Unicode Standard. U+0057 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W and U+0077 LATIN SMALL LETTER W sit in the Basic Latin block, matching their ASCII codes: decimal 87 and hexadecimal 0x57 for the capital, decimal 119 and 0x77 for the small letter. Both were added in Unicode version 1.1, are classified as cased letters with left-to-right bidirectional class, and case-fold to the lowercase w.[3](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0057) • [13](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0077)
East Asian text processing adds width variants. U+FF37 FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W and U+FF57 FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER W, in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block, are designed to occupy the same horizontal space as a CJK ideographic character, double the width of a typical ASCII letter. They carry compatibility decompositions to U+0057 and U+0077 respectively, so normalization folds them back to the plain letters.[4](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2Bff57)
Diacritic-bearing forms are encoded separately. Latin Extended-A contains Ŵ (U+0174) and ŵ (U+0175), each canonically decomposable into W or w plus the combining circumflex accent, and Latin Extended Additional adds W with grave, acute, diaeresis, dot above, and dot below, the small Welsh forms among them.[11](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0174) • [14](https://www.unicode.org/Public//UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/1e00/) The Unicode Collation Algorithm, the standard's specification for comparing strings, supplies the Default Unicode Collation Element Table as the default ordering data for all Unicode characters, with language-specific tailoring on top of it.[15](https://unicode-org.github.io/unicode-reports/tr10/tr10.html)
## References
1. [W, Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language (Tom McArthur), Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/w)
2. [W (letter) — the twenty-third letter of the Latin alphabet, Leandro Alegsa](https://en.alegsaonline.com/art/132689)
3. [U+0057 "W" Latin Capital Letter W Unicode Character](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0057)
4. [U+FF57 "ｗ" Fullwidth Latin Small Letter W Unicode Character](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2Bff57)
5. [W, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/W)
6. [Doubling down on the letter "w", Our Languages blog, Language Portal of Canada](https://our-languages.canada.ca/en/blogue-blog/the-letter-w-eng)
7. [The History of w, Medieval Writings](https://medievalwritings.atillo.com.au/scripts/letters/historyw.htm)
8. [W, World English Historical Dictionary](https://wehd.com/102/W.html)
9. [Appendix G5. Letter w, Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books, Cataloger's Reference Shelf](https://www.itsmarc.com/crs/mergedprojects/rarebks/rarebks/appendix_g5._letter_w.htm)
10. [Miracles lately vvrovght: the use of "vv" for "w" in 17th-century titles, Folger Shakespeare Library](https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/miracles-lately-vvrovght-the-use-of-vv-for-w-in-17th-century-titles/)
11. [U+0174 "Ŵ" Latin Capital Letter W with Circumflex Unicode Character](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0174)
12. [W — Alphabet Letters, Divinity Atlas](https://www.divinityatlas.com/alphabet-letters/unnamed-23)
13. [U+0077 "w" Latin Small Letter W Unicode Character](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0077)
14. [Latin Extended Additional, Unicode 18.0.0 names list](https://www.unicode.org/Public//UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/1e00/)
15. [Unicode Technical Standard #10: Unicode Collation Algorithm](https://unicode-org.github.io/unicode-reports/tr10/tr10.html)
16. [Classification of Sounds, Dickinson College Commentaries](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/tr/grammar/latin/classification-sounds)
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*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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