V

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see V (disambiguation).

Writing cursive forms of V

V (named vee /ˈviː/,) is the 22nd letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Ancient Corinthian vase depicting Perseus, Andromeda and Ketos. The inscriptions denoting the depicted persons are written in an archaic form of the Greek alphabet. Perseus (Greek: ΠΕΡΣΕΥΣ) is inscribed as ΠΕΡΣΕVΣ (from right to left), using V to represent the vowel [u].

The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.

In Greek, the letter upsilon 'Υ' was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel [u] as in "moon". This was later fronted to [y], the front rounded vowel spelled 'ü' in German.

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 an intermediary—to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, 'num' — originally spelled 'NVM' — was pronounced /num/ and 'via' was pronounced [ˈwia]. From the 1st century AD on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/ (kept in Spanish), then later to /v/.

During the Late Middle Ages, two forms of 'v' developed, which were both used for its ancestor /u/ and modern /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 'valour' and 'excuse' appeared as in modern printing, 'have' and 'upon' were printed as 'haue' and 'vpon'. The first distinction between the letters 'u' and 'v' is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where 'v' preceded 'u'. By the mid-16th century, 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.

Letter

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /v/ represents the voiced labiodental fricative. See Help:IPA.

In English, V is unusual in that it has not traditionally been doubled to indicate a short vowel, the way for example P is doubled to indicate the difference between 'super' and 'supper'. However, that is changing with newly coined words, such as 'divvy up' and 'skivvies'. Like J, K, Q, X, and Z, V is not used very frequently in English. It is the 6th least common letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 1.03% in words. V is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the Australian version of the game of Scrabble. C also cannot be used in the American version.

The letter appears frequently in the Romance languages, where it is the first letter of the second person plural pronoun and (in Italian) the stem of the imperfect form of most verbs.

Name in other languages

• Catalan: ve, pronounced [ˈve]; in dialects that lack contrast between /v/ and /b/, the letter is called ve baixa [ˈbe ˈbajʃə] "low B/V".
• Czech: vé ['vɛː]
• French: vé ['ve]
• German: Vau [ˈfaʊ]
• Italian: vi [ˈvi] or vu [ˈvu]
• Portuguese: vê [ˈve]
• Spanish: uve [ˈuβe] is recommended, but ve [ˈbe] is traditional. If V is pronounced in the second way, it would have the same pronunciation as the letter B in Spanish (i.e. [ˈbe] after pause or nasal sound, otherwise [ˈβe]); thus further terms are needed to distinguish ve from be. In some countries it is called ve corta, ve baja, ve pequeña, ve chica or ve labiodental.

In Japanese, V is often called "bui" (ブイ), an approximation of the English name which substitutes the voiced bilabial plosive for the voiced labiodental fricative (which does not exist in native Japanese phonology) and differentiates it from "bī" (ビー), the Japanese name of the letter B. Some words are more often spelled with the b equivalent character instead of vu due to the long-time use of the word without it (e.g. "violin" is more often found as baiorin (バイオリン) than as vaiorin (ヴァイオリン)).

Use in writing systems

In most languages which use the Latin alphabet, ⟨v⟩ has a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound. In English, it is a voiced labiodental fricative. In most dialects of Spanish, it is pronounced the same as ⟨b⟩, that is, [b] or [β̞]. In Corsican, it is pronounced [b], [v], [β] or [w], depending on the position in the word and the sentence. In German and Dutch it can be either [v] or [f].

In Native American languages of North America (mainly Iroquoian), ⟨v⟩ represents a nasalized central vowel, /ə̃/.

In Chinese Pinyin, while ⟨v⟩ is not used, the letter ⟨v⟩ is used by most input methods to enter letter ⟨ü⟩, which most keyboards lack (Romanised Chinese is a popular method to enter Chinese text).

In Irish, the letter ⟨v⟩ is mostly used in loanwords, such as veidhlín from English violin. However the sound [v] appears naturally in Irish when /b/ (or /m/) is lenited or "softened", represented in the orthography by ⟨bh⟩ (or "mh"), so that bhí is pronounced [vʲiː], an bhean (the woman) is pronounced [ən̪ˠ ˈvʲan̪ˠ], etc. For more information, see Irish phonology.

This letter is not used in the Polish alphabet, where /v/ is spelled with the letter ⟨w⟩ instead, following the convention of German. In German, the letter ⟨v⟩ sounds like /f/.

Informal romanizations of Mandarin Chinese use V as a substitute for the close front rounded vowel /y/, properly written ü in pinyin and Wade-Giles.

Other systems

In the 19th century, ⟨v⟩ was sometimes used to transcribe a palatal click, /ǂ/, a function since partly taken over by ⟨ç⟩.

Related characters

Descendants and related letters in the Latin alphabet

• U u : Latin letter U, originally the same letter as V
• W w : Latin letter W, descended from V/U
• V with diacritics: Ṽ ṽ Ṿ ṿ Ʋ ʋ Ꝟ ꝟ
• IPA-specific symbols related to V: ⱱ ʋ
• Ʌ ʌ : Turned v
• ⱴ : V with curl

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤅: Semitic letter Waw, from which the following symbols originally derive
  • Υ υ : Greek letter Upsilon, from which V derives
    • Y y : Latin letter Y, which, like V, 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 u, also descended from Upsilon via the digraph of omicron and upsilon

Ligatures and abbreviations

• ∨: Logical disjunction
• ℣ : Versicle sign

Computing codes

Character information

Preview	V		v
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V		LATIN SMALL LETTER V
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	86	U+0056	118	U+0076
UTF-8	86	56	118	76
Numeric character reference	V	V	v	v
EBCDIC family	229	E5	165	A5
ASCII 1	86	56	118	76

¹ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

V is the symbol for vanadium. It is number 23 on the periodic table. Emerald derives its color green from either Vanadium or Chromium.

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Victor

		File:Sign language .svg	File:BSL letter .svg
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling)	Braille dots-1236 Unified English Braille

See also

• Dominant, in music theory
• Vee
• ∨, logical disjunction
• Check mark

External links

• Media related to V at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of V at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of v at Wiktionary