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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 The Latin sound developed into Romance ; therefore V no longer adequately represented Germanic . In German — as in Romance — the phoneme also became (this is why German W represents that sound). In Dutch, W is a labiodental approximant (with the exception of words with EEUW, which have ), or other diphthongs containing -UW. There are only five major European languages that use W in native words: English, German, Polish, Dutch, and Welsh. Only English uses it to represent a voiced labial-velar approximant though, German and Polish uses it for a voiced labiodental fricative (with Polish using Ł for the labial-velar approximant), while Dutch uses it for a labiodental approximant. Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh as a vowel. In the Swedish alphabet, 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. 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 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 represent both and , which causes 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 sound in the Cyrillic alphabet is Ў, a letter unique to the Belarusian language. The Russians, however, use the Cyrillic character В, (thie 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 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" and "dub-dub-dub" is also used in place of www in New Zealand and Australia (see pronunciation of "www"). 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".
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 "& Meanings for W See also sn:W yo:W | ||||||||
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