Wynn facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Ƿ
Ƿ ƿ
(See below)
Usage
Writing system	Futhorc
Type	Alphabetic and Logographic
Language of origin	Old English language
Phonetic usage	[w] /wɪn/
Unicode value	U+01F7, U+01BF
History
Development	ᚹ Ƿ ƿ
Time period	~700 to ~1100
Descendants	Ꝩ ꝩ
Sisters	None
Transliteration equivalents	w
Variations	(See below)
Other
Other letters commonly used with	w
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Name	Proto-Germanic	Old English
	*Wunjō	Wynn
	"joy"
Shape	Elder Futhark	Futhorc
Unicode	ᚹ U+16B9
Transliteration	w
Transcription	w
IPA	[w]
Position in rune-row	8

Wynn in the Hildebrandslied manuscript (830s): the text reads ƿiges ƿarne

Capital wynn appears twice in this 10th century inscription in Breamore: her sƿutelað seo gecƿydrædnes ðe

Wynn or wyn (Ƿ ƿ; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound /w/.

History

The letter "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 during the Middle English period, circa 1300. In post-wynn texts it was sometimes replaced with ⟨u⟩ but often replaced with a ligature form of ⟨uu⟩, from which the modern letter ⟨w⟩ developed.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poems:

ᚹ Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏt
sāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæf
blǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.

Who uses it knows no pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger 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 two runes (along with þ) 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, the letter 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⟩.

Wynn in Unicode

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode:

• Error using : Input "01f7" is not a hexadecimal value.
• Error using : Input "01bf" is not a hexadecimal value.
• Error using : Input "16b9" is not a hexadecimal value.
• Error using : Input "A768" is not a hexadecimal value.
• Error using : Input "A769" is not a hexadecimal value.
• Error using : Input "A7D5" is not a hexadecimal value.

Computing codes

See also

• Digamma
• Eth
• Meldorf fibula
• Thorn (letter)
• Vend (letter)
• Yogh
• Ỽ