How the Letter W Was Born From the Wreckage of Rome

Editor’s note: This is a linguistics and history piece from Literary Hub, not a cybersecurity or technology-industry story. It appears miscategorized for our beat; flagging for a desk reassignment. Summary follows for reference.

The letter W is a byproduct of Rome’s fifth-century collapse. As Germanic-speaking foederati rose from military auxiliaries to kings across the former Western Empire, they kept Latin as the prestige language of administration—but Latin scribes had no way to spell the /w/ sound in rulers’ names like Clovis and Odoacer. The sound had once existed across the Mediterranean (Greek’s digamma, Latin’s early V) but had faded or shifted, with V hardening into /v/. Starting around the sixth century, likely in Francia, scribes solved the gap by doubling the letter U; forms like ‘UUandeberctus’ eventually fused into a single ligature and, by the 11th century, became W—predating the split of U and V, which is why English calls it ‘double U’ and French ‘double vé.’

England took a different route for a while. Alongside Latin, Old English scribes borrowed a runic character, wynn (Ƿ), to write /w/—it appears in Beowulf and on inscribed objects like a ninth- or tenth-century Kentish dagger. Wynn survived the Norman Conquest but was gradually squeezed out by the W entrenched in French and Latin usage. The piece also traces spelling fossils left by the medieval scribal environment: to avoid confusing strings of near-identical vertical pen strokes, scribes swapped U for O after W, which is why we now write wolf, wood, and wonder. Some modern Ws even descend from an Old English G that softened into a /w/ over time. The English /w/, the author notes, is a rare survivor of a sound most Indo-European languages lost.