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Wynn

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled Wen) is a letter in the old English alphabet that came from a rune (ᚹ) by the same name. It was used to represent the sound /w/.

In written Old English and Middle English it was borrowed to represent the same sound, as the letter W was a later invention. It gradually fell out of use as 'uu' (hence "double-U" for our modern "w") and later a merged form 'w' increased in use to represent the /w/ sound.

The rune is called wynn "joy, bliss" in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem:

Wenne bruceþ, ðe can weana lyt
sares and sorge and him sylfa hæfþ
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.

It is not continued in the Young 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 the only rune other than þ to have been borrowed into the Latin alphabet.

Wynn in Unicode

  • Latin Capital Letter Wynn - Ƿ - U+01F7
  • Latin Small Letter Wynn - ƿ - U+01BF
  • Runic Letter Wynn - ᚹ - U+16B9
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