w
“W” is the 23rd Letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet (Derived) which is pronounced as “double u” .Frequency of W’s usage in words among all other alphabet is 2.360%.
Historical Trace
Initially the letter w was not appeared in the basic modern Latin alphabet and is not occurred in the ancient Latin alphabet too. It is actually derived from Germanic languages which includes old English. In general you can find the letter “w” in the places those representing the names of personal or places.
In 7th or 8th centuries the Germanic /w/ sound was used by the earliest writers of English. It seems that “double U” is derived from the diagraph‹uu› .In the middle the west Germanic sound /w/ has started to take the form [v].There is no significant differences in the pronunciations of [w] and [v] .
Linguistic Usage
If we take Europe, only small number of languages has adopted W in their alphabets. Languages like German, English, Dutch, Walloon, Sorbian and Welsh have “W” in their native words. Kashubian, German and Polish are using “W” to represent the voiced labiodental fricative (/v/).
English
In English “w” is used to represent the phoneme /w/.Dutch uses “w” to bring the phoneme /ʋ/ or /w/.
Finnish
In Finnish <W> is not appeared as a separate letter but it appears as a variance of ‹V›.
Danish
In the languages like Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, ‹W› is pronounced like /v/. So it is named as double-v and not double-u. In these kind of languages, <W> only exists in borrowed words, old names and foreign words .In 1980 <W> was introduced officially into the Danish alphabets and in the late 2006 it was introduced in Swedish language
In the roman languages “W” can be seen mostly in Loan words (recently borrowed) and in foreign names.
Japanese
In Japanese “W” is pronounced as /daburu/.
Pictorial representations
This picture shows the word ward. Here w is written with uu.Initially the Germanic had alphabets in their own which was existing in the form of runes. Early English adopted so many of these alphabets for English phoneme. Those were not usually found in Latin.
This picture shows the word wille .This representation is taken from the 0th 10 centuries Anglo-Saxon poem which was written insular minuscule script.
This one is from 12th century.
When “W” has started to use on the English Documents, it was represented as 2 interlocking “V” .
This form of “W” belongs to 12th century which is an example of Caroline minuscule.
This one is called as Latin writ belongs to the same 12th century. Here “W” is represented with lopsided look.
This one is from 13th century .It is a Latin language representation which was written in the calligraphic document. Here the symbol seems as same as before but this time it appears with flourish.
This representation of “w” belongs to the 15th century which is taken from the Dutch language book of hours.
Character Encoding
The following table specifies value of “W” in some character Encodings
Character Latin Latin
Encoding capital letter w small letter w
Decimal hex Decimal hex
Unicode 87 0057 119 0077
ASCII 87 57 119 77
UTF-8 87 57 119 77
EBCDIC 23 E6 166 A6
What Does “W” Stand for in various fields?
General
W is a nick name of former American president George W Bush
W –Represents web
W- Represents width in mathematical calculations.
W- Stands for west
Broadcast media
W – Represents W band which denotes the radio frequencies in the ranges 75 to 111 GHz.
Science
W – Represents watt .It denotes the measure of power in International systems of unit.
W – is used to denote Wavelength (physics).
W – Denotes the symbol for mechanical work (physics)
W- is used as a single letter abbreviation for Tryptophan
(amino acid )