The letter "W"

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph ⟨uu⟩, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn ᚹ for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the Middle English period, circa 1300.^[2] In post-wynn texts it was sometimes replaced with ⟨u⟩ but often replaced with a ligature form of ⟨uu⟩, which the modern letter ⟨w⟩ developed from.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poems:^[3]

ᚹ Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏt
sāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæf
blǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.

— Lines 22–24 in The Anglo-Saxon Runic Poem

Who uses it knows no pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter.

— Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger 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 one of the two runes (along with þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

As with þ, the letter wynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century the usual practice has been to substitute the modern ⟨w⟩.