V, or v, is the twenty-second letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is vee (pronounced /ˈviː/), plural vees.[1]
During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form "v" was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form "u" was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas "valour" and "excuse" appeared as in modern printing, "have" and "upon" were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters "u" and "v" is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where "v" preceded "u". By the mid-16th century, the "v" form was used to represent the consonant and "u" the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter V. U and V were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later.[2] The rounded variant became the modern-day version of U, and the letter's former pointed form became V.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /v/ represents the voiced labiodental fricative. See Help:IPA.
Like J, K, Q, X, and Z; V is not used very frequently in English. It is the sixth least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 1% in words. V is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the British[3] and Australian[4] versions of the game of Scrabble. It is one of only two letters (the other is C) that cannot be used this way in the American version.[5][6] V is also the only letter in the English language that is never silent.[7]
The letter appears frequently in the Romance languages, where it is the first letter of the second person plural pronoun and (in Italian and Catalan) the stem of the imperfect form of most verbs.
In most languages which use the Latin alphabet, ⟨v⟩ has a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound. In English, it is a voiced labiodental fricative. In most dialects of Spanish, it is pronounced the same as ⟨b⟩, that is, [b] or [β]. In Corsican, it is pronounced [b], [v], [β] or [w], depending on the position in the word and the sentence. In contemporary German, it is pronounced [v] in most loan-words while in native German words, it is always pronounced [f]. In standard Dutch it is traditionally pronounced as [v] but in many regions it is pronounced as [f] in some or all positions.