A question about 'W'...?

Question

My friend wants to know why we call 'W' "double-you". He says that it should obviously be called a "double-vee." I say it doesn't matter, but he wants to know if there is a history here?

Answer 1

GOT IT!

The earliest form of the letter W was a doubled V used in the 7th century by the earliest writers of Old English; it is from this digraph that the modern name "double U" comes. This digraph was not extensively used, as its sound was usually represented instead by the runic wynn (Ƿ), but W gained popularity after the Norman Conquest, and by 1300 it had taken wynn's place in common use. Other forms of the letter were a pair of Vs whose branches cross 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" (compare the shape of ƕ).

The sounds /w/ (spelled with U/V) and /b/ of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial approximant /β/ between vowels, in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, V no longer represented adequately the Germanic /w/. In German, the phoneme /w/ later became /v/; this is why German W represents that sound. In Dutch, W is a labiodental approximant (with the exception of words with EEUW, which have /eːw/), or other diphthongs containing -uw.

Answer 2

Originally, in Latin (the first language to use our alphabet and the reason it's called the Roman alphabet), both V and U were written as V, which as a consonant had the sound of English W. Similarly, I and J were both written as I, which as a consonant had the sound of our consonant Y (like the J in German). Later different forms were added to represent the vowel V (U) and the consonant I (J). The W seems to have been introduced into Northern European languages to represent the original sound of V when the Latin V shifted to its present-day pronunciation. As to why it's called a double U rather than a double V (which it is called in French), I can't say, so I haven't really answered the question. However, I hope I've shed some litght on the matter!

Answer 3

Yes, there is a history. The letter "u" was originally written like a "v" in Latin. When the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) developed from Latin, they diverged from the mother tongue. Some of them used the expression "double u" in their language and others "double v." Think of the letter "s" in Old and Medieval English, which was written to look like an elongated "f." It's all a matter of the way the letters were written.

Answer 4

Because the individual who made up our minds what the letters must seem like had simply made the V and used to be getting worn out of attempting to determine the way to layout all of the letters. So, he simply placed 2 V's in combination and it got here out like W.

Answer 5

It started out as a double v. I think the reason it's called double u is because it started more as a sign then a letter (which yeah is just a sign).

It somehow replaced the letter wynn (no symbol for it), which does have a lot more logical name.

Answer 6

french people call it double-vee cause it looks like VV but then again, it could be double U's too...UU probably closer to V though

Answer 7

it's called "double u" because it follows the u. long ago it was u, than uu, than v. as the other reader stated, it was written so it appeared as two Us. the typewriter actually made it appear like two Vs.

Answer 8

I don't think it should be called either one. "Doube-you" starts out making the D sound, so the letter W should actually just be called Wuh, since that is the sound it makes. It's only letter in the alphabit like that, W is just a weird letter.

Answer 9

It may be because when you write "W" in cursive like how they did back in the day, it looked like two "U"'s put together

Answer 10

the original "w" did in fact look like two u's (uu). then it eventually changed to look like two v's