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.