Facts for Kids

Long ago, people who used the Phoenician alphabet wrote a sign called waw that stood for a sound like w or v. That sign moved into other alphabets and over many hundreds of years changed shape and sound as it traveled across regions.

In the Middle Ages, scribes used two small versions of one symbol: a pointed form and a rounded form. The pointed one became the modern V and the rounded one became the letter U. By the 1500s people began to treat them as two different letters: one mostly for the vowel sound and one mostly for the consonant sound.

V (uppercase) and v (lowercase) are the twenty-second letter of the Latin alphabet. You see this letter in English and many other languages around the world. People write it in books, signs, names, and codes, so it is a small but busy part of our writing system.

The letter's name in English is vee. When you say it, your voice makes a buzzing sound as your lower lip touches your upper teeth. You hear that sound in words like van, very, and five.

The letter has two usual shapes: a tall pointed one, written as V, and a smaller rounded one, written as v. In print and handwriting these two shapes look slightly different but mean the same letter. When you talk about more than one, you can say "vees."

Other languages call this letter by other names. For example, French speakers say "vé," German speakers say "Vau," and some languages say "vi." The sound the letter stands for can also change a little from language to language.

In English, the letter V usually stands for the sound you hear in van, live, and very. This sound happens when your lower lip touches your top teeth while your voice buzzes. That makes V easy to hear and say.

At the ends of words we often write the sound using -ve, as in have, give, and five, even though the v is the last sound. English does some old spelling tricks: for example, the vowel before v is often written as o in words such as love and glove. The letter V is not very common — it appears in about one out of every hundred words — and it is never silent in English.

U and W are two letters that grew out of shapes people once used for V. Long ago, scribes did not always write a separate sign for the sound we call /v/ and the sound /u/. Over time, the curved form became the modern U, and a doubled form — written like two u’s together — became W. That is why English uses both U and W but they are cousins of V.

Other related signs include special letters used in older languages, such as Ỽ ỽ for Middle Welsh. People also added little marks (accents or hooks) to V to make new sounds or to show pronunciation. Linguists today still use related symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet to show sounds like the V family.

V is used for more than just a speech sound. It is the Roman numeral for the number five, so V on an old clock or in a list can mean 5. In science, V is the chemical symbol for the metal vanadium, which is element number 23 on the periodic table. Some emeralds get their green color from tiny amounts of vanadium or chromium.

You will also see v, v., or vs as short forms of the word “versus,” used in competitions (team A vs team B). The letters U and W are also relatives of V in the history of the alphabet.

v appears in many non-Romance languages too, and it can mean different sounds. Most languages that use the Latin alphabet treat v as the voiced “v” sound (bottom lip to top teeth). In Corsican, v can be heard as b, v, a softer bilabial sound, or even a w-like sound, depending on the place in the word.

In German, native words often use v for an “f” sound (for example, Vater = father), while loanwords keep the “v” sound. In Dutch, v was voiced but in many regions it is heard more like f in some positions. When writing Cherokee with Latin letters, v is used for a nasalized “uh” sound.

v often sounds different across Romance languages. In many languages like Italian or French it usually stands for the sound we make by touching the bottom lip to the top teeth (a voiced “v”). But in other Romance languages, a change called betacism made v and b sound the same.

For example, in Spanish the letters v and b are usually pronounced alike. Between vowels the sound is softer, almost like a quick glide, while after a pause or after an m or n it becomes a clear “b” sound. This is why v can seem to behave like b in some words.

Unicode is a set of numbers computers use so every place can show the same letters. The letter V has a few standard codes: U+0056 V LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V and U+0076 v LATIN SMALL LETTER V.

There are also fullwidth forms used in East Asian text to match character width: U+FF36 Ｖ FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V and U+FF56 ｖ FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER V. These codes help computers and phones show the right letter no matter the language or font.

Waw is a very old letter from the Phoenician alphabet and is the great-grandparent of V. When writing spread to Greece, this shape became Upsilon (written Υ υ). The Greeks passed the idea on to the Romans, who turned it into the letter we call V.

Other alphabets picked up the same shape and made their own cousins. For example, early Cyrillic used letters like Ѵ/ѵ (called izhitsa) and modern Cyrillic has letters such as У/у and Ү/ү that are related by sound or shape. In short, the little mark we call V has relatives across many languages because its simple shape moved around the world.