Why Is the Letter W a Double U?

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VOICEMAIL: “Hi, Grammar Girl. I have a question about a letter of the alphabet. I always grew up singing W, X, Y, and Z; but when I was taking German class in college, W was pronounced “double-veh,” and that got me thinking about what's up with that letter. The W to us looks like two V's put together, unless you're doing cursive, and then it can kinda look like two U’s put together. But neither one is correct in saying "v-v" or "u-u," or so what's up with the letter W and it’s weird name. Thank you.”

Like many of the words we use in English, we have Latin to thank for our alphabet. With only a few exceptions, the letters we know and love trace their roots at least back to ancient Rome.

One of those exceptions, however, is the weird and wonky letter W. 

The letter W is young

The letter W is one of the youngest letters of the English alphabet, not arriving until somewhere around the 11^th century, and has the distinction of being the only one named after a different letter of the alphabet. Not only that, based on the way we almost always see the letter printed, it’s not even named after the correct other letter!

Our caller isn’t the only one to wonder why we call a letter that looks like two V’s that have been welded together “double U.”

The answer, weirdly, is that the name of the letter is much older than the letter itself.

Latin didn't have a W sound

Back in the 7^th century, when English started being written using Latin letters, there was a problem with how to write the /w/ sound. Latin had no such sound, and so had never developed a letter for it. 

Since it was slightly similar to the sound represented by the letter U, that seemed like a natural choice, but English also had a /u/ vowel sound, so early scribes started using “uu” to represent that specific sound.

After about a hundred years of that, people in Britain started using a letter from the Runic alphabet called “wyn,” which looks a bit like a combination of lowercase letter P and a backwards “y” (“ƿ”), and before long the “uu” all but disappeared on the island.

UU became common in Europe

Although the “uu” convention disappeared in England, it continued in Europe. Some German dialects adopted it for their /w/ sound, and French, like Latin, didn’t have a letter W, so “uu” was used to represent Germanic or Celtic loan words and proper names with that sound in...

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