W

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

W is the twenty-third letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is pronounced double-u, making it the longest letter name to pronounce: [ˈdʌb.l̩.juː]. Along with Y, it is one of two letters to serve as both a vowel and a consonant. In chemistry, it is the symbol of the element tungsten.

[edit] History

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 <uu> 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.

[edit] Usage

There are only six major European languages that use W in native words: English, German, Polish, Basque, Dutch, and Welsh. English uses it to represent a voiced labial-velar approximant, German and Polish uses it for a voiced labiodental fricative (with Polish using Ł for the labial-velar approximant), and Dutch uses it for a labiodental approximant. Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh to represent vowels as well as consonants.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /w/ is used for the voiced labial-velar approximant, probably based on English.

In the Swedish alphabet, W, called "dubbel-ve" 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. The same development happened in the Danish alphabet in 1980.

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 /w/ in a native word is needed, a spelling from the native alphabet, such as V, U, or OU, can be used instead.

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 В, (/v/ the equivalent of V in the Latin alphabet), when transliterating "W."

"Double U" is the only English letter name with more than one syllable. This gives the nine-syllable initialism www the irony of being an abbreviation that takes three times as many syllables to say as 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 and University of Wyoming are both known colloquially as "U Dub". One widespread use of "dub", however, occurs in the name of the automobile company Volkswagen, abbreviated VW and sometimes pronounced "V-Dub" In the Texas dialect of American English, the name is often condensed to two syllables rather than three, as in George W. Bush's nickname of "Dubya". In recent years, people with last names that begin with "W" frequently received a nickname consisting of their first initial combined with "dub." This may have been popularized by basketball players such as Chris Webber (C-Dub).

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.

There has been an increasing move away from the three-syllable pronunciation as a result; the "dub" pronunciation vies with a "wub" pronunciation. It remains to be seen whether either, one-syllable version can replace the original, three-syllable version.

Recently a third, and perhaps more phonetic, pronunciation 'wah' (/wɔ/) has begun to enter usage in certain literary circles. The justification being that is a more natural method of verbally expressing the letter.

[edit] As a vowel in English

In addition to a handful of Welsh loanwords—cwm and crwth being the most notable—in words such as "low" or "bow" the letter W represents a vowel. The last sound in both words, and, indeed, several others, is the non-syllabic vowel /ʊ̯/ in the diphthong /oʊ̯/, written ow.^[1]Also, W in the word "owl" becomes a diphthong with the O, such as the letter U does in "out".

[edit] Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital W is codepoint U+0057 and the lowercase w is U+0077.

The ASCII code for capital W is 87 and for lowercase w is 119; or in binary 01010111 and 01110111, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital W is 230 and for lowercase w is 166.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#87;" and "&#119;" for upper and lower case respectively.