V, or v, is the twenty-second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is vee (pronounced ), plural vees.
The letter ultimately comes from the Phoenician letter waw by way of .
During the Late Middle Ages, two glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including and modern . The pointed form was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form 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 and is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where preceded . By the mid-16th century, the form was used to represent the consonant and the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter . and were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later. The rounded variant became the modern-day version of , and the letter's former pointed form became .
In English, represents a voiced labiodental fricative.
Special rules of orthography normally apply to the letter :
Like , , , and , is not used very frequently in English. It is the sixth least frequently used letter in the English language, occurring in roughly 1% of words. is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the British and Australian versions of the game of Scrabble. It is one of only two letters (the other being ) that cannot be used this way in the American version. is also the only letter in the English language that is never silent.
The letter represents in several Romance languages, but in others it represents the same sound as , i.e. , due to a process known as betacism. Betacism occurs in most dialects of Spanish, in some dialects of Catalan and Portuguese, as well as in Aragonese, Asturleonese and Galician.
In Spanish, the phoneme has two main allophones; in most environments, it is pronounced , but after a pause or a nasal it is typically . See Allophones of /b d g/ in Spanish phonology for a more thorough discussion.
In Corsican, represents , , or , depending on the position in the word and the sentence.
In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, represents a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound.
In contemporary German, it represents in most loanwords, while in native German words, it always represents .
In standard Dutch, it traditionally represents , but in many regions, it represents in some or all positions.
In the Latinization of the Cherokee syllabary, represents a nasalized schwa, .
In Chinese pinyin, while is not used, the letter is used by most input methods to enter the letter , which most keyboards lack (romanized-input Chinese is a popular method to enter Chinese text). Informal romanizations of Mandarin Chinese use as a substitute for the close front rounded vowel , properly written in both pinyin and WadeâÂÂGiles.
In the , represents the voiced labiodental fricative.