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V, or v, is the twenty-second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''vee'' (pronounced ), plural ''vees''.

Name

* (); in dialects that lack contrast between and , the letter is called , "low B/V".
*
*
*
* or
* Japanese: is called a variety of names originating in English, most commonly or , but less nativized variants, violating to an extent the phonotactics of Japanese, of ー , or , and are also used. The phoneme in Japanese is used properly only in loanwords, where the preference for either or depends on many factors; in general, words that are perceived to be in common use tend toward .
*
*
* is recommended, but is traditional. If is referred to as the latter, it would have the same pronunciation as the letter in Spanish (i.e. after pause or nasal sound, otherwise ); thus further terms are needed to distinguish from . In some countries it is called , , , or .

History

The letter ultimately comes from the Phoenician letter '' waw'' by way of .

During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including and modern . The pointed form was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas ''valour'' and ''excuse'' appeared as in modern printing, ''have'' and ''upon'' were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters and is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where preceded . By the mid-16th century, the form was used to represent the consonant and the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter . and were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later. The rounded variant became the modern-day version of , and the letter's former pointed form became .

Use in writing systems

English

In English, represents a voiced labiodental fricative.

Special rules of orthography normally apply to the letter :
* Traditionally, is not doubled to indicate a short vowel, the way, for example, is doubled to indicate the difference between ''super'' and ''supper''. However, that is changing with newly coined words, such as , ''divvy up'' and ''skivvies''.
* A word-final sound (except in ''of'') is normally spelled -, regardless of the pronunciation of the vowel before it. This rule does not apply to transliterations of Slavic and Hebrew words, such as ''Kyiv'' (''Kiev''), or to words that started out as abbreviations, such as ''sov'' for ''sovereign''.
* The sound is spelled , not , before the letter . This originated with a mediaeval scribal practice designed to increase legibility by avoiding too many vertical strokes ( minims) in a row.

Like , , , and , is not used very frequently in English. It is the sixth least frequently used letter in the English language, occurring in roughly 1% of words. is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the British and Australian versions of the game of Scrabble. It is one of only two letters (the other being ) that cannot be used this way in the American version. is also the only letter in the English language that is never silent.

Romance languages

The letter represents in several Romance languages, but in others it represents the same sound as , i.e. , due to a process known as betacism. Betacism occurs in most dialects of Spanish, in some dialects of Catalan and Portuguese, as well as in Aragonese, Asturleonese and Galician.

In Spanish, the phoneme has two main allophones; in most environments, it is pronounced , but after a pause or a nasal it is typically . See Allophones of /b d g/ in Spanish phonology for a more thorough discussion.

In Corsican, represents , , or , depending on the position in the word and the sentence.

Other languages

In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, represents a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound.

In contemporary German, it represents in most loanwords, while in native German words, it always represents .

In standard Dutch, it traditionally represents , but in many regions, it represents in some or all positions.

In the Latinization of the Cherokee syllabary, represents a nasalized schwa, .

In Chinese pinyin, while is not used, the letter is used by most input methods to enter the letter , which most keyboards lack ( romanized-input Chinese is a popular method to enter Chinese text). Informal romanizations of Mandarin Chinese use as a substitute for the close front rounded vowel /y/, properly written in both pinyin and Wade–Giles.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiced labiodental fricative.

Other uses

* V is used to represent the Roman numeral 5.
* V is the symbol for vanadium. It is number 23 on the periodic table. Emerald derives its green coloring from either vanadium or chromium.
* ''v'', ''v.'', and ''vs'' can also be used as an abbreviation for the word versus when between two or more competing items (e.g. Brown v. Board of Education).

Related characters

Descendants and related letters in the Latin alphabet

*U u : Latin letter , originally the same letter as
*W w : Latin letter , descended from
*Ỽ ỽ : Middle Welsh
* with diacritics: Ṽ ṽ Ṿ ṿ Ʋ ʋ ᶌ
* IPA-specific symbols related to :
* : Modifier letter small with hook is used in phonetic transcription
* : Modifier letter small with right hook is a superscript IPA letter
*Ʌ ʌ ᶺ: Turned
*ⱴ : with curl
* Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to :
**
**
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**

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

*𐤅: Semitic letter Waw, from which the following symbols originally derive:
**Υ υ : Greek letter Upsilon, from which derives
***Y y : Latin letter , which, like , also derives from Upsilon (but was taken into the alphabet at a later date)
***Ѵ ѵ : Cyrillic letter izhitsa, also descended from Upsilon
***У у : Cyrillic letter , also descended from Upsilon via the digraph of omicron and upsilon
**** Ү ү : Cyrillic letter , descended from and izhitsa, is used in the scripts for languages in the former Soviet Union and currently the Russian Federation, as well as in Mongolian. Most commonly, it represents or .

Ligatures and abbreviations

*℣ : Versicle sign
*Ꝟ ꝟ : Forms of were used for medieval scribal abbreviations

Other representations

Computing

Other

Notes

References

External links

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{{Latin alphabet, V}

ISO basic Latin letters