• CHARLEMAGNE’S SCRIBES CREATED a sign by placing two Us side by side with a space between. It signified a ‘w’ sound in the late Latin, German and French of that time, i.e. AD 900. It was described as ‘two Us’. So when printers adapted it they started off by printing ‘VV’ – two Vs next to each other. Only later, by about 1700, did they set in lead a new letter ‘W’ which was of course still called a ‘double u’. In French, though, it is known as ‘double v’.

There used to be another sign to indicate a ‘w’ sound, the ‘wyn’, which you can find in ‘D is for Disappeared Letters’.

w

The lower-case ‘w’ standing for the sound ‘w’ had to wait till the upper-case ‘W’ had been fixed.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

As we’ve seen, this derives from the Carolingian handwritten double letter.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

On its own at the beginning of words, it does service in ‘witch’ and ‘wonder’. Most English speakers pronounce ‘w’ in the same way as they pronounce ‘wh’ in ‘why’, ‘where’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘whence’. In ‘who’ and ‘whole’ the ‘h’ does its work, reminding us that in Old English the formation for that breathy sound was ‘hw’, where the ‘w’ was a ‘wynn’.

‘W’ combines with vowels to make ‘raw’, ‘new’ and ‘now’.

It combines with ‘r’ in unpronounced ways: ‘wrong’, ‘wright’ and ‘write’, and again in ‘two’ and ‘answer’. The initial ‘w’s were once pronounced but unlike some initial ‘h’s, once pronounced now not, the ‘w’ hung about.

You can put ‘s’ in front of it to make ‘sweet’ but only when imitating people who pronounce ‘r’ as ‘w’ do we write things like ‘fwee’, ‘bwight’. ‘Twice’ reminds us that the ‘w’ in ‘two’ was once pronounced as it is in ‘between’ and the neologism ‘tweenies’. ‘Dweeb’ is doing well at the moment too. ‘Kwik’ was once a word that advertisers liked. Talking of ‘once’, it’s a word that deserves a ‘w’ on the front to match ‘wonder’ but we get by without.

Following ‘w’ we write consonants as in ‘newt’, ‘gawp’, ‘news’, ‘Newfoundland’ (a bit of a cheat as it was once three separate words), ‘trawl’, ‘hawser’, ‘town’ and ‘shawm’.

‘Awkward’ manages two Ws in place, in front of and following a consonant.

Norman French brought in ‘William’ from ‘Guillaume’, the ‘warranty’ and the ‘guarantee’, the ‘ward’ and the ‘guard’.

Sound-play with ‘w’ can involve crying: ‘woo-woo-woo’. Owls go ‘woo’ or ‘whoo’ or ‘tu-whit-tu-woo’. We stop horses by saying, ‘Whoa!’ which can also be used to show people you don’t want them to go on doing what they’re doing or saying: ‘Whoa, man!’ We can do a ‘wee’ or a ‘wee-wee’ or a ‘widdle’. Something good is a ‘whizz’. We’re pleased when we say ‘wow!’ Things that aren’t straight are ‘wonky’. ‘Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town’, because he comes from Scotland where ‘wee’ means ‘small’.

If you’re a parent you’re probably wondering ‘Where’s Wally?’ though in the US it’ll be ‘Where’s Waldo?’ If you can’t get to the bottom of the matter, your mind is full of the ‘whys and wherefores’. Two old chants go: ‘Why are we waiting?’ and ‘We won’t, we won’t, we won’t be buggered about . . .’