Wynn


Wynn or wyn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound.

History

The letter "W"

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn 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. It was replaced with once again, from which the modern developed.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is ":wikt:joy|joy, :wikt:bliss|bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poems:

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".
It is one of the two runes to have been borrowed into the English alphabet. A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds,, and.
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.

Wynn in Unicode and HTML Entities

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