V is the 22nd letter of the alphabet used for the modern English language. It is also used in a number of other languages, including French, German, and Spanish. The V sound occurs in such words as very, ever, and move.
Scholars believe the letter V evolved from an Egyptian hieroglyph (pictorial symbol) that represented a mace, a kind of club. The letters F, U, V, W, and Y all evolved from this hieroglyph. By around 1500 B.C., hieroglyphs had been adapted into an alphabet—the earliest known alphabet—known as Proto-Sinaitic. Examples of Proto-Sinaitic writing have been found in the Sinai Peninsula. By 1100 B.C., an alphabet for the Phoenician language had evolved from Proto-Sinaitic. See Semitic languages .
The Phoenician letter that can be traced to the Egyptian mace hieroglyph is the sixth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, waw. The Phoenicians used it to represent the beginning W sound of waw, their word for peg. When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet around 800 B.C., waw evolved into two Greek letters, digamma, which resembled the letter F, and upsilon, which was written something like a capital Y. The Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet around 700 B.C. Some varieties of the letter that came from upsilon looked like a Y in Etruscan, others like a V. The Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet in 650 B.C. and used the V-shaped variety.
By A.D. 100, the rounded U shape of the letter V came into use in manuscripts. In the late 1400’s, the V shape was used in printing at the beginning of a word and the U shape within a word. This practice resulted in such spellings as vnder (under) and euer (ever). By the early 1600’s in France, V began to be used for the consonant sound and U for the vowel sound. English printers soon followed this system. But U and V were not counted as separate letters until 1801, with the publication of William Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary. Perry’s dictionary was the first to separately alphabetize letters under U and V.
