Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿen, and ƿin) 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 In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

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 during the

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...

period, circa 1300. In post-wynn texts, it was sometimes replaced with but often replaced with a ligature form of , which the modern letter developed from.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "

joy The word joy refers to the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune, and is typically associated with feelings of intense, long lasting happiness. Dictionary definitions Dictionary definitions of joy typically include a sense of ...

bliss BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known system language until C debuted a few years later. Since then, C b ...

", known from the Anglo-Saxon

rune poems Rune poems are poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Three different poems have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, and the Icelandic Rune Poem ...

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the

Younger Futhark The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. The r ...

, 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 Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branc ...

reconstruction of the rune's name as ''*wunjô'' "joy". It is one of the two runes (along with thorn, þ) to have been borrowed into the

English alphabet The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The word ''alphabet'' is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, '' alpha'' and '' beta''. ...

(or any extension of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...

for the sounds , , and . The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the

classical Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

's ''P'', or ''Q'', or from the Rhaetic's alphabet's ''W''. 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 .

Unicode

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

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History

The letter "W"

Meaning

Miscellaneous

Unicode

Computing codes

References

See also