wynn

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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 (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled wen, ƿynn, or ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is 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.^[1] It was replaced with <uu> once again, from which the modern <w> developed.

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

ᚹ Ƿenne bruceþ, ðe can ƿeana lyt
sares and sorge and him sylfa hæf
blæd and blysse and eac byrga geniht.^{[citation needed]}

Bliss he enjoys who knows not pain,

sorrow nor anxiety, and himself has

prosperity and bliss and a good enough house.^{[citation needed]}

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 ƿynn called Vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

As with þ, ƿynn 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 ƿynn's visual resemblance to P.

Wynn in Unicode and HTML Entities

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

• U+01F7 Ƿ latin capital letter wynn (HTML: Ƿ)
• U+01BF ƿ latin letter wynn (HTML: ƿ)
• U+16B9 ᚹ runic letter wunjo wynn w (HTML: ᚹ)
• U+A768 Ꝩ latin capital letter vend (HTML: Ꝩ)
• U+A769 ꝩ latin small letter vend (HTML: ꝩ)
• "Unicode character search". http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/. Retrieved 2012-04-28. 

References

See also

• Meldorf fibula
• Thorn (letter)