How do you spell w?
If I show you a pair of apples and ask you to write on a piece of paper the number of apples that you see, you can write either “2” or “two”.
If I ask you to identify the 23rd letter of the English alphabet and write it on a piece of paper, you can write either “w” or… what?
“Double u”?
“Double-u”?
“Doubleu”?
“Doubleyou”?
Have you ever seen “w” written out before?
According to dictionary.com, here’s the answer.
“W” written out is “double u”, because the name originated from the Latin letter “uu” — literally dubbed “double u”.
The convoluted evolutionary history seems not worth digging into, but the tl;dr is that in its ancestry, the modern English language had:
- Three sounds it wanted to make (the sounds that in modern English are associated with the symbols “w”, “v”, and “you”)
- Four symbols to represent them (“u”, “v”, “uu”, “w”)
- Three names for those symbols (“double u”, “vee”, “you”)
…and as languages evolved over the centuries, the sounds, symbols, and names got mixed and matched like a Lannister family tree.