The letter V (or v) is the twenty-second and fifth-to-last letter of the contemporary English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet, respectively. In English, it is known as vee (pronounced /vi/), plural vees.

The letter V, like the contemporary letters F, U, W, and Y, is derived from the Semitic letter Waw. For further information, see F.

The Greek letter upsilon “” was derived from waw to represent the vowel in “moon” at first. This was eventually changed to, the front rounded vowel in German written “ü.”

In early Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed as V — either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or indirectly from the Etruscan alphabet — to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/, num — originally spelled NVM — was pronounced /num/, and via was pronounced. Consonantal /w/ evolved into / (preserved in Spanish) from the 1st century AD onwards, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect.

Two tiny glyphs evolved in the late Middle Ages, both of which were employed for sounds such as /u/ and contemporary /v/. Regardless of sound, the pointed form “v” was used at the start of a word, while the rounded form “u” was used in the middle or end. So, although “valour” and “excuse” were printed as “valour” and “excuse,” “have” and “upon” were printed as “haue” and “vpon,” respectively. A Gothic script from 1386 records the earliest differentiation between the letters “u” and “v,” with “v” before “u.” The “v” form was adopted to represent the consonant sound by the mid-16th century, while the “u” form was adopted to represent the vowel sound, giving us the current letter “u.” It took many years for the capital and majuscule “U” to be recognized as a separate letter.

V is known in Japanese by a variety of names derived from English, the most popular of which is or, though less nativized forms of which are, to some extent, breaking Japanese phonotactics, of, or, and are also used. In Japanese, the phoneme /v/ is only properly employed in loanwords, where the choice for /v/ or /b/ is determined by a variety of variables; in general, words that are believed to be in frequent usage tend to be pronounced with /b/.

The letter v has a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound in most languages that use the Latin alphabet. It’s a voiced labiodental fricative in English. It is pronounced the same as b in most Spanish dialects, that is, or. It’s pronounced,, or in Corsican, depending on where it’s in the word and in the phrase. It is pronounced in most loan-words in current German, although it is always pronounced in original German terms. It is typically pronounced as in standard Dutch, although it is pronounced as in some or all locations in several places.

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