V

In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V—either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as a middle man—to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, num — originally spelled ‹NVM› — was pronounced /nuːm/ and via was pronounced /wiːa/. From the first century A.D. on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/, then later to /v/.

During the late Middle Ages, two forms of ‹v› developed, which were both used for modern ‹u› and ‹v›. The pointed form ‹v› was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form ‹u› was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valor and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed ‹haue› and ‹vpon›. The first distinction between the letters ‹u› and ‹v› is recorded in a Gothic alphabet from 1386, where ‹v› preceded ‹u›. By the mid-1500s, the ‹v› form was used to represent the consonant and ‹u› the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter ‹u›. Capital ‹U› was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later.

Like J, K, Q, W, and Y, V is not used very frequently in English. However, it appears frequently in the Spanish and French languages.

In Chinese pinyin, letter ‹v› is missing, as there is no sound [v] in Standard Mandarin but the letter ‹v› is used by most input methods to enter letter ‹ü›, since it is missing on most keyboards. Romanised Chinese is a popular method to enter Chinese text phonetically.

In Unicode the capital V is codepoint U+0056 and the lowercase v is U+0076.

The EBCDIC code for capital V is 229 and for lowercase v is 165.

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

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