V

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

Look up V or v in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

V ( /ˈviː/; named vee)^[1] is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents [hide] 1 Letter 2 Other names 3 Codes for computing 4 See also 5 References

[edit] Letter

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 A.D. on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/ (only kept in Spanish and Catalan), then later to /v/.
In Roman numerals, the letter V is used to represent the number 5. It was used because it resembled the convention of counting by notches carved in wood, with every fifth notch double-cut to form a “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 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-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.^[2]
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /v/ represents the voiced labiodental fricative. See Help:IPA.
Like J, K, Q, W, and Y, V is not used very frequently in English. However, it appears frequently in the Spanish (where its pronunciation is the same as B) and French languages.
This letter, like Q and X, is not used in the Polish alphabet. /v/ is spelled with the letter ‹w› instead, following the convention of German.

[edit] Other names

• Catalan: ve, pronounced [ˈve], but in dialects that lack the /v/ sound is named ve baixa [ˈbe ˈbajɕə] “low vee”.
• French: vé [ve]
• German: fau [ˈfaʊ]
• Italian: vi [ˈvi] or vu [ˈvu]
• Portuguese: vê [ˈve]
• Spanish: uve [ˈuβe] is recommended, but ve [ˈbe] is traditional. As both are pronounced /b/ in Spanish^[3], further terms are needed to distinguish ve from be, the letter ‹b›. 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). This name is 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. The sound can be written with the relatively recently developed katakana character 「ヴ」 (vu)^[4] va, vi, vu, ve, vo (ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴ, ヴェ, ヴォ^?), though in practice the pronunciation is usually not the strictly labiodental fricative found in English. Moreover, 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^?) due partly to inertia, and to some extent due to the more native Japanese sound).
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 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/ is lenited or “softened”, represented in the orthography by ‹bh›, so that bhí is pronounced [vʲiː], an bhean (the woman) is pronounced [ən̪ˠ ˈvʲan̪ˠ], etc.