Waw (letter)

Waw (letter)
Waw
Phoenician Hebrew Aramaic Syriac Arabic
Waw ו Waw ܘ و
Alphabetic
derivatives
Greek Latin Cyrillic
Ϝ Υ F V U W Y У
Phonemic representation: w, v, o, u
Position in alphabet: 6
Numerical (Gematria/Abjad) value: 6

Waw (wāw, sometimes also spelled vau, or vav) is the sixth letter of the Northwest Semitic family of scripts, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic ("sixth" in abjadi order; it is 27th in modern Arabic order).

In most Semitic languages it represents the sound [w], and in some (such as Hebrew and Arabic) also the long vowel [], depending on context.

In Modern Hebrew, the consonantal pronunciation is [v] or [β], a pattern shared by certain non-Semitic languages using the Arabic alphabet such as Persian and Urdu.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek digamma (Ϝ, whose name in Greek was probably Ϝαυ) and upsilon (Υ), and Etruscan V (V or V). The latter is the source of the Latin letter F.

Vav literally means hook/peg/spear.

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Hebrew Waw