Wynn

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This article is on the letter. For other uses, see Wynn (disambiguation).

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled Wen) is a letter of the old English alphabet. It was used to represent the sound /w/.

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph <uu>, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn (ᚹ) for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use (perhaps under the influence of French orthography) during the Middle English period, circa 1300 (Freeborn 1992:25). It was replaced with <uu> once again, from which the modern <w> developed.

The name of the rune, meaning "joy, bliss", is known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem:

ᚹ Ƿenne bruceþ, ðe can ƿeana lyt

sares and sorge and him sylfa hæfþ

blæd and blysse and eac byrga geniht.

Bliss he enjoys who knows not suffering,

sorrow nor anxiety, and has

prosperity and happiness and a good enough house.

the Elder Futhark wunjô

It is not continued in the Young Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter 𐍅 w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as wunjô "joy".

It is one of the only runes (with þ and Æ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter Wynn called Vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

As with þ, 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 <w> instead due to its visual resemblance to P.

[edit] Wynn in Unicode

Latin Capital Letter Wynn	Ƿ	U+01F7
Latin Small Letter Wynn	ƿ	U+01BF
Runic Letter Wynn	ᚹ	U+16B9

[edit] References

Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.

The Latin alphabet
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