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WHY IS "W" PRONOUNCED "DOUBLE-U" AND NOT "DOUBLE-V"
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WHY IS "W" PRONOUNCED "DOUBLE-U" AND NOT "DOUBLE-V"
Early printers sometimes used vv for lack of a w in their type. The name double-u recalls the former identity of u and v, which you can also see in a number of words with a related origin, for example flour/flower, guard/ward, or suede/Swede.
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In the 7th century scribes wrote uu for /w/; later they used the runic symbol known as Wynn. European scribes had continued to write uu, and this usage returned to England with the Norman Conquest in 1066.
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English uses the Latin alphabet of the Romans. However, this had no letter suitable for representing the speech sound /w/ which was used in Old English, though phonetically the sound represented by /v/ was quite close.
However its representation and relation to the sound /v/ in spelling give it an indirect and important role in shaping the letter “w”.
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Meanwhile, another sound was forming out of v, the /u/. At first glance “u” should not be part of our story.
In Classical Latin, the "w" sound was represented by the letter "v". Through the years, the language shifted, the sound associated with the Latin “v” became a voiced bilabial fricative.