Wynn

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled Wen or ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet. It was 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 (Freeborn 1992:25). 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.

Bliss he enjoys who knows not suffering,

sorrow nor anxiety, and has

prosperity and happiness and a good enough house.

the Elder Futhark *wunjô

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.

Ƿynn in Unicode and HTML Entities

References

• Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.

See also

• Meldorf fibula