How UU became the letter W

It is almost an English-language rite of passage to realize that the letter W – pronounced “double you” starts with the letter D. The pronunciation of the English alphabet is drilled into the heads of students from such a young age that features of the letters can be obscured, such as the fact that the letter which is pronounced “double U” is actually written with two V characters. The long-perplexing subject was even enshrined in a popular 19th century children’s poem:

Public Opinion,Volume XVIII, Number 19

In continental French and Spanish, the letter W is called “double-v” and “uve doble”, respectively. English, however, maintains an archaic form that dates back to the beginning of written Old English. Writing systems are not usually invented anew: generally they are adopted from pre-existing systems from older languages. Old English adapted a Latin script, but had to account for sounds that did not exist in Latin, such as “wuh”. For this the scribes chose to use two U letters, such as in the first line of Caedmon’s Hymn written in 735 AD.

Caedmon’s Hymn Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 800 AD)
nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard / metudæs maecti and his modgidanc / uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra 

Close-up of “uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra”

By the end of the 8th century the “uu” had begun to be replaced with the runic letter ƿ, called the wyn. Thus the Old English word “ƿið” represents the pronunciation of the Modern English word “with”, as seen in the opening line of this recipe from Bald’s Leechbook, compiled in the mid 10th century.

Bald’s Leechbook Book 2, Chapter 59 (London, British Library Harley MS 55, f. 1r)

While the UU digraph fell out of use in English, it was maintained in the literary Latin widely in use across Europe, and was picked up in languages such as German, French and Breton. Foreign names were written with the UU digraph quite commonly, such as in Vita Sancti Wingualoei, by Wrdesten, written in Brittany sometime in the 9th century.

Vita et miracula sancti Winwaloei: Wrdisten (c 1020).

No writing has survived that explains explicitly why the UU digraph fell out of use in English orthography, but by the 14th century it had been replaced by the ligatured W, initially employed by Norman scribes. The likeliest cause is two concurring reasons: the increasing impenetrability of similar looking letters and the the adoption of the printing press.

Around the same time period in the late 13th and early 14th century, English orthography lost three letters: wynn, eth and thorn. These were all runic letters adopted in the early 7th century to account for English and Germanic sounds not represented in Latin script. The runic letters looked very similar to other Latin letters, for example the thorn closely resembles a P. In older forms of written scripts, such as in the Junius Manuscript, the distinction is evident.

Junius Manuscript; England, 1000; Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, p. 83.

However, in later scripts, such as Blackletter, many letters became less distinct. In this text from the Psalterium Latino-Gallicum, written in about 1200 AD, there appear to be many letters U, but they actually represent five different letters.

Psalterium Latino-Gallicum: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. NAL 1670

One of these letters is V, which was often represented with a curved or a squared bottom, as seen in the chapter numbers from Beowulf. V, W and U all came to be sharpened, across several centuries and through the minds and pens of Norman scribes, appearing much as they did in the Bayeaux tapestry.

Beowulf: London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A XXV
Bayeaux tapestry

By the import of the printing press in the 15th century, the pointed V and the rounded U characters had been differentiated to represent the sounds they do today. The characters employed in the printing presses represented the sounds used in Early New High German, a language that did not have a “wuh” sound. Thus, many printers employed two V characters to represent this sound, as seen in the Reign of King Edward the Third, published in 1596.

The Raigne of King Edward the Third, as it Hath Bin Sundrie Times Plaied about the Citie of London: (1596)

The ligatured W was eventually standardized as a printed character, and in languages where the letter represents largely foreign sounds the character became named “double V”, or something similar. In English, however, the “double U” name from the earliest days of Old English scribal tradition hung around, because the V character had for several centuries represented both U and V.

@mathewssonya

#stitch with @BFG the Outta Pocket King 👑 and @lord_dermott many orthographic developments came about because a previous letter was hard to read. The letter W is no exception! What gets me though is that the official spelling of the plural is “double-ues”. 🤯 #lingtok #learnwithtiktok #doubleu #orthography #latinalphabet #oldenglish #historylesson #linguisthere #scottishtiktok #themoreyouknow #languagetok #writertok #writingcommunity

♬ original sound – Sonya