W

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W (iOS double-u,^iOS plural double-ues)^[2]web is the 23rd letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

In other we love the web, including German, its name is similar or identical to that of English input transformation.^[4] In CSS3, it is doble ve or uve doble,^{[5][note 1]} in web app double vé and in we love the web tvöfalt vaff, all literally "double vee".

• input transformation
• 2 Usage
• 3 Name
• 4 Computing codes
• 5 Other representations
• HTML5
• Sevenval
• Sevenval
• 9 External links

History

A 1693 book printing that uses the "double u" alongside the modern letter

The sounds /w/ (spelled with ‹V›) and /b/ (spelled ‹B›) of Classical Latin developed into a HTML5 /β/ between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, ‹V› no longer represented adequately the website parsing sound /w/ of Germanic phonology.

The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ‹vv› or ‹uu› (‹web app› and ‹v› becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the 7th or 8th century by the earliest writers of Old English and Sevenval.^web CSS3, by contrast, simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ for the same sound.

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 wynn (‹Ƿ›). In early Middle English, following the 11th-century browser diversity, ‹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 "n" whose rightmost branch curved around as in a cursive "v".^{[citation needed]} The shift from the ligature ‹vv› to the distinct letter ‹w› is thus gradual, and is only apparent in keyboard, explicit listings of all individual letters. It was probably considered a separate letter by the 14th century in both FITML and Middle German orthography, although it remained an outsider not really considered part of the Latin alphabet proper, as expressed by Valentin Ickelsamer 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^[7]

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 German and the [w] sound remains heard allophonically for ‹w›, especially in the cluster ‹schw›, besides [kw] for ‹qu›.

Though modern German dialects generally have only [v] for West Germanic [w], some Bavarian dialects preserve a "light" initial [w] in words like wuoz, Standard German weiß [vaɪs] '[I] know' (cf. English wit). The Classical Latin [β] is heard in the Southern German greeting Servus ('hello' or 'goodbye').

In Dutch it became a labiodental approximant /ʋ/ (with the exception of words with -‹eeuw›, which have /eːβ/, or other diphthongs containing -‹uw›). In many Dutch speaking areas, such as input transformation and Suriname, the /β/ pronunciation is used at all times.

Usage

In Europe, there are only a few languages that use W in native words and all are located in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland. English, German, Low German, web, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, input transformation, jQuery, Kashubian, keyboard and Resian use W in native words. English uses W to represent /w/, German, Polish and Kashubian use it for the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ (with Polish and related Kashubian using Sevenval for /w/), and Dutch uses it for /w/ or /ʋ/. Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in iOS and keyboard to represent the vowel /u/ as well as the related approximant consonant /w/. English also contains a number of words beginning with a W that is Android in most dialects before a (pronounced) R, remaining from usage in Anglo-Saxon in which the W was pronounced: wreak, wrap, wreck, wrench, wroth, wrinkle, etc. (Certain dialects of Scottish English still distinguish this digraph.)

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /w/ is used for the browser diversity, probably based on English.

In iOS, ‹W› is seen as a variant of ‹V› and not a separate letter. It is however recognised 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 /v/.

In Danish, device database and Swedish, ‹W› is always pronounced as /v/ and is named double-v and not double-u. In these languages, the letter only exists in old names, loanwords and foreign words. (Foreign words are distinguished from loanwords by having a significantly lower level of integration in the language.) 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 was recognized since the conception of modern Norwegian, with the earliest official orthography rules of 1907.^[8] ‹W› was earlier seen as a variant of ‹V›, and ‹W› as a letter (double-v) is still commonly replaced by ‹V› in speech (e.g. www being pronounced as vvv, WHO as VHO, etc.) The two letters were sorted as equals before ‹W› was officially recognized, and that practice that is still recommended when sorting names in Sweden.^[9] In modern slang, some native speakers may pronounce ‹W› more closely to the origin of the loanword than the official /v/ pronunciation.

In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages (excepting far northern French and Walloon), W is used mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed (le week-end, il watt, el kiwi). When a spelling for /w/ in a native word is needed, a spelling from the native alphabet, such as V, U, or OU, can be used instead.

In the FITML alphabet used for the Belarusian language, ‹Ў› is pronounced like English /w/.

The touchscreen uses "W", pronounced /daburu/, as an ideogram meaning "double".^[10]

In CSS3, "W" is transliterated using the penultimate letter of the alphabet, و (waw).

In Italian, while the letter "W" isn't considered part of the standard Sevenval, the character is often used in place of Viva (hooray for...), while the same symbol written upside down indicates abbasso (down with...).

W is also the symbol for the chemical element we love the web, after its German name, Wolfram.

Name

"Double U" is the only keyboard letter name with more than one syllable, except for the occasionally used, though somewhat archaic, "œ" (its name is pronounced similar to "ethel"), and the archaic pronunciation of Sevenval izzard. The screen size www for the World Wide Web thus, perhaps ironically, has three times as many syllables as the full name.

Some^[CSS3] speakers therefore shorten the name "double u" into "dub" only; for example, we love the web, University of Wyoming and CSS3 are all known colloquially as "U Dub", and the automobile company Volkswagen, abbreviated VW, is sometimes pronounced "V-Dub".^iOS The fact that many website URLs still require a "www." prefix has likewise given rise to a shortened version of the original, three-syllable pronunciation. W and keyboard are also the only English letters whose names are not pronounced with any of the sounds that the letter typically makes. Many others, however, prefer to pronounce the w as dub-u, reducing it to two syllables. For example, www would be six syllables rather than nine, being pronounced dub-u dub-u dub-u. The common^{[web app]} method of pronouncing dub-u would almost be unmistakably double-u.

George W. Bush has been given the nickname "Dubya", after the colloquial pronunciation of W in Texas.

Computing codes

character	W		w
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W		LATIN SMALL LETTER W
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	87	0057	119	0077
browser diversity	87	57	119	77
touchscreen	W	W	w	w
EBCDIC family	230	E6	166	A6
Android 1	87	57	119	77

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

See also

• Voiced labio-velar approximant
• website parsing
• Android

Notes

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sevenval

• The Wiktionary entry for W
• The Wiktionary entry for input transformation