Wynn

Ƿ
Ƿ
Ƿ ƿ
(See below)
Usage
Writing system	Adapted from Futhorc into Latin script
Type	Alphabetic and logographic
Language of origin	Old English
Sound values	[w]; /wɪn/
In Unicode	U+01F7, U+01BF
History
Development	ᚹ Ƿ ƿ;
Time period	~700 to ~1100
Descendants	Ꝩ ꝩ
Sisters	Ꝩ ꝩ
Transliterations	w
Variations	(See below)
Other
Associated graphs	w
Writing direction	Left-to-right
	This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Wynn or wyn^[1] (Ƿ ƿ; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿyn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound /w/.

This article contains runic characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of runes.

Name	Proto-Germanic	Old English
	*Wunjō	Wynn
	"joy"
Shape	Elder Futhark	Futhorc
Shape
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*.

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.^[2] In post-wynn texts, it was sometimes replaced with ⟨u⟩ but often replaced with a ligature form of ⟨uu⟩, which the modern letter ⟨w⟩ developed from.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss", known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poems:^[3]

ᚹ Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏt
sāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæf
blǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.
— Lines 22–24 in the Anglo-Saxon runic poem

Who uses it knows no pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter.
— Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)

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 thorn, 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/.

The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's P,^[4] or Q,^{[citation needed]} or from the Rhaetic's alphabet's W.^[5] 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⟩.

Unicode

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode:^[6]

U+01F7 Ƿ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN
U+01BF ƿ LATIN LETTER WYNN
U+16B9 ᚹ RUNIC LETTER WUNJO WYNN W
U+A768 Ꝩ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VEND
U+A769 ꝩ LATIN SMALL LETTER VEND
U+A7D4 ꟔ <reserved-A7D4>^[7]
U+A7D5 ꟕ LATIN SMALL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN^[8]

Computing codes

Character information
Preview	Ƿ		ƿ
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN		LATIN SMALL LETTER WYNN
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	503	U+01F7	447	U+01BF
UTF-8	199 183	C7 B7	198 191	C6 BF
Numeric character reference	Ƿ	Ƿ	ƿ	ƿ

References

^ "wyn". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
^ Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan. p. 25. ISBN 9780776604695.
^ Dickins, Bruce (1915). Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 14–15.
^ Odenstedt, Bengt (1990), On the Origin and Early History of the Runic Script, Typology and Graphic Variation in the Older Futhark, Uppsala, ISBN 91-85352-20-9{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link).
^ Gippert, Jost, The Development of Old Germanic Alphabets, Uni Frankfurt, archived from the original on February 25, 2021, retrieved March 21, 2007.
^ "UCD: UnicodeData.txt". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved November 22, 2022.
^ This character has been approved to be encoded as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN in Unicode 17.0. See here.
^ Everson, Michael; West, Andrew (October 5, 2020). "L2/20-268: Revised proposal to add ten characters for Middle English to the UCS" (PDF).