The letter W is the twenty-third letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is double-u .
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 runicwynn (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".
The Latin [w] sound developed into Romance [v]; therefore V no longer adequately represented Germanic [w]. In German " as in Romance " the phoneme [w] was lost; this is why German W represents [v] rather than [w]. In Dutch, W is a labiodental approximant (with the exception of words with EEUW, which have ), or other diphthongs containing -UW.
In the Finnish alphabet, "W" is seen as a variant of "V" and not a separate letter. It is however recognized and maintained in names, like "William". In the alphabets of modern Romance languages, it is not used either, except in foreign names and words recently borrowed (le week-end, il watt, el kiwi). When a spelling for the [w] sound in a native word is needed, a spelling from the native alphabet, such as U or OU, can be used instead. In Hebrew the same letter, waw or vav is used to spell both [w] and [v], which can make problems in some cases. For example many Israelis say "Hollyvud" rather than "Hollywood" or "Darvin" rather than "Darwin". See more (in Hebrew).
The equivalent representation of the [w] sound in the Cyrillic alphabet is Ў, a letter unique to the Belarusian language. The Russians, however, use the Cyrillic character ', which is always pronounced , when transliterating "W."
"Double U" is the only English letter name with more than one syllable. This gives the nine-syllable initialismwww the irony of being an abbreviation that takes more syllables to say than the unabbreviated form. A few speakers therefore shorten the name "double u" into "dub" only, although this is rather rare and nonstandard; for example, University of Washington is known colloquially as "U Dub". In the Texas dialect of American English, the name is often condensed to two syllables rather than three, resulting in George W. Bush's nickname of "Dubya".
Swedish Double V
The W, called "double V" in Sweden, finally entered the language officially in 2006, being accepted into the Swedish Academy's dictionary. Up to that time, it was simply treated as a variety of the single V, but has become the 29th letter to be acknowledged as part of the Swedish alphabet.
