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History

The letter "W"

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph ⟨uu⟩, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn ᚹ for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the Middle English period, circa 1300.² In post-wynn texts, it was sometimes replaced with ⟨u⟩ but often replaced with a ligature form of ⟨uu⟩, which the modern letter ⟨w⟩ developed from.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss", known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poems:³

ᚹ Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏtsāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæfblǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.

Who uses it knows no pain,sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself hasprosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter.

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter 𐍅 w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".

It is one of the two runes (along with thorn, þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's P,⁴ or Q, or from the Rhaetic's alphabet's W.⁵ As with þ, the letter wynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century, the usual practice has been to substitute the modern ⟨w⟩.

Unicode

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode:⁶

• U+01F7 Ƿ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN
• U+01BF ƿ LATIN LETTER WYNN
• U+16B9 ᚹ RUNIC LETTER WUNJO WYNN W
• U+A768 Ꝩ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VEND
• U+A769 ꝩ LATIN SMALL LETTER VEND
• U+A7D4 ꟔ <reserved-A7D4>⁷
• U+A7D5 ꟕ LATIN SMALL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN⁸

Computing codes

See also

• Digamma
• Eth
• Meldorf fibula
• Thorn (letter)
• Vend (letter)
• Yogh
• Ỽ

References

1. "wyn". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.) https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?q=wyn ↩

2. Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan. p. 25. ISBN 9780776604695. 9780776604695 ↩

3. Dickins, Bruce (1915). Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 14–15. https://archive.org/details/runicheroicpoems00dick ↩

4. Odenstedt, Bengt (1990), On the Origin and Early History of the Runic Script, Typology and Graphic Variation in the Older Futhark, Uppsala, ISBN 91-85352-20-9{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link). 91-85352-20-9 ↩

5. Gippert, Jost, The Development of Old Germanic Alphabets, Uni Frankfurt, archived from the original on February 25, 2021, retrieved March 21, 2007. http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/germ/runealph.htm ↩

6. "UCD: UnicodeData.txt". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved November 22, 2022. http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/UnicodeData.txt ↩

7. This character has been approved to be encoded as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN in Unicode 17.0. See here. https://unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html ↩

8. Everson, Michael; West, Andrew (October 5, 2020). "L2/20-268: Revised proposal to add ten characters for Middle English to the UCS" (PDF). https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20268-n5145-ormulum.pdf ↩