Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound .

History

The letter "W"

While the earliest

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , scribes soon borrowed the

rune Runes are the letter (alphabet), letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, a ...

''wynn'' for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use (perhaps under the influence of French orthography) during the Middle English period, circa 1300. It was replaced with once again, from which the modern developed.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is " joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poems:

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the

Gothic alphabet The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet used for writing the Gothic language. Ulfilas (or Wulfila) developed it in the 4th century AD for the purpose of translating the Bible. The alphabet essentially uses uncial forms of the Greek alphabet, wit ...

the letter ''w'' is called , allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as ''*wunjô'' "joy". It is one of the two runes (along with þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds , , and . As with þ, the letter wynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century the usual practice has been to substitute the modern .

Wynn in Unicode

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode: * * * * * *

History

The letter "W"

Meaning

Miscellaneous

Wynn in Unicode

Computing codes

References

See also