The Illuminated Letter "W"

 
Additional Illuminated letter "W"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.

W (named double-u, plural double-ues) is the 23rd letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

       The sounds /w/ (spelled ⟨V⟩) and /b/ (spelled ⟨B⟩) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative /β/ between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, ⟨V⟩ no longer represented adequately the labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology.

       The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ (⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the 7th or 8th century by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German. Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ 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 digraph 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 ⟨Ƿ⟩ wynn. In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ gained 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 crossed 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 curved around as in a cursive vee.

       The shift from the digraph ⟨VV⟩ to the distinct ligature ⟨W⟩ 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

Poor w is so infamous and unknown that many barely know either its name or its shape, not those who aspire to being Latinists, as they have no need of it, nor do the Germans, not even the schoolmasters, know what to do with it or how to call it; some call it we, [... others] call it uu, [...] the Swabians call it auwawau

       In Middle High German (and possibly already in late Old High German), the West Germanic phoneme /w/ became realized as [v]; this is why the German ⟨w⟩ today represents that sound. There is no phonological distinction between [w] and [v] in contemporary German. Read more . . .