Wynn - The Encyclopedia

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This article is on the letter. For other uses, see Wynn (disambiguation).

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Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled wen, ƿynn, or ƿen) was 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 pain,

sorrow nor anxiety, and himself has

prosperity and bliss and a good enough house.

Name	Proto-Germanic	Anglo-Saxon
	*Wunjō	Wynn
	"joy"
Shape	Elder Futhark	Futhorc

Unicode	ᚹ U+16B9
Transliteration	w
Transcription	w
IPA	[w]
Position in rune-row	8

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.