Origin and history of W

twenty-third letter of the modern English alphabet; one of the most recent additions to it.

It was not a character in the Phoenician, Greek or Roman alphabets, but the Modern English sound it represents is close to the devocalized consonant expressed by Roman -U- or -V-. In Old English, this originally was written -uu-, but by 8c. began to be expressed by the runic character wyn (Kentish wen), which looked thus: ƿ (the character is a late addition to the online font set and doesn't display properly on many computers).

After the Conquest, in 11c., Norman scribes introduced -w-, a ligatured doubling of Roman -u- which had been used on the continent for the Germanic "w" sound. Wyn disappeared c. 1300.

-W- is not properly a letter in the modern alphabet of French, which uses it only in borrowed foreign words such as wagon, weekend, Western, whisky, wombat. Charles Mackay ("Extraordinary Popular delusions and the Madness of Crowds") reports that the Scotsman John Law, author of the Mississippi stock swindle of 1720, was known in France as Monsieur Lass "to avoid the ungallic sound, aw."

As the atomic symbol of tungsten, it represents Latin wolframium, from German Wolfram "iron tungstate" (see wolfram).