Alphabet Letters
V
Roman Letters
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Origin Adapted in the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet
V is the twenty-second letter of the Roman alphabet. In classical Latin the letter carried both the vowel u and the consonantal w glide, as in the classical uinum, wine, while in English and later usage V is the voiced labiodental fricative, as in van. It comes from the Phoenician waw by way of Greek Upsilon; the pointed V and the rounded U were one letter in Latin, splitting into the separate consonant V and vowel U only in the Renaissance, and W was formed later from a doubled V or U. V is the Roman numeral for five, thought to represent an open hand of five fingers, with X being two Vs joined for ten. V is also the sign for victory and, in physics, for voltage and volume.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAdapted in the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Origin PeriodReached Latium through Etruscan intermediaries 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Origin PeriodYoungest of the three historical alphabets; never used as numerals 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Place of OriginEtruscans took it from Greek colonists in the bay of Naples 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Place of OriginLatium and central Italy, by way of the Etruscans 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Origin of the NameLatin calls its letters by their sounds, dropping the old names 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Origin of the NameLatin letters have no names of their own, unlike Hebrew and Greek 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Origin of the NameNo alphabetic numeral system; Roman numerals are not one 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Origin of the NameThere is no ancient Latin gematria 1Tradition: The Latin alphabet and its Greek and Etruscan antecedents Sense of the Name Attributions
Associated SoundCarried both the vowel u and the consonantal w glide in classical Latin, as in classical uinum, wine; in English and later usage the voiced labiodental fricative, as in van 1 Disputed
Chaldean Letter Value6 3Tradition: Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean Sourced to the subject's own accountThe values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact. Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: one letter to a sound, consonant or vowel, descended by way of the Old Italic and Etruscan scripts from the Greek alphabet, itself adapted from Phoenician. 1 PositionTwenty-second of twenty-six in the Roman alphabet 1 Rival Systems
A Rival System's AttributionFrom a 20th-century 1-9 repeating chart marketed as Pythagorean 2Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) A Rival System's AttributionNot Pythagoras's; rival Chaldean scheme assigns different values 2Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) A Rival System's AttributionV = 4 in modern name numerology 2Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Modern Numerology
Pythagorean Letter Value4 2Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Learn More
V: The Letter in the Roman Alphabet
V is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents /w/ in classical Latin, later /v/. Historically it is from Phoenician waw by way of Greek upsilon. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.
A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter V the digit 4; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.
V: Letterform and Roman Numeral
This atlas covers elsewhere how Latin V and U began as a single letter, descended from Greek upsilon, used for both a vowel and a consonant sound throughout antiquity. What is now considered the true, defining shape of V is in fact the older of the two forms: the angular V seen on Roman inscriptions is the original ancient letter, while the rounded U is the later cursive variant that split off from it.
Because the Renaissance-era graphic separation, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, assigned the ancient angular shape to the consonant sound and the newer rounded shape to the vowel, V is unusual among Latin letters in being, historically, the parent form of a split rather than one of two equally new offshoots. Roman numeral use reinforces the same letter's antiquity in a different role: V stands for five, and the standard account derives the numeral, like I and X, from an ancient tally notch rather than from the alphabetic letter itself, meaning the numeral value and the phonetic letter share a shape by coincidence of Roman notation rather than by any planned design. V's lowercase form is simply a smaller version of the capital, one of the letters where the two cases remain visually identical.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
The Latin letter V descends from Greek Upsilon, reaching Latin through the Etruscan adaptation of a Western Greek alphabet. Upsilon entered Latin early through Etruscan as the letter V, serving for both the vowel u and the consonant w.
Derived from This
U and V were one letter in Latin. The split into a vowel letter and a consonant letter is an early modern printing convention. Roman inscriptions use V for both values throughout. The distinction is imposed by later editors and typefounders.
W was formed by doubling V, in medieval scribal practice, to write a sound Latin no longer had. A medieval addition for the Germanic w. It is absent from the classical Latin alphabet entirely.
Related To
Theban V is the substitution sign for the Latin letter V. Trithemius prints the script as a cipher alphabet with Latin equivalents. Its earlier history, and the attribution to Honorius of Thebes, are not established by that printing.
Roman V and Greek Upsilon continue the same Phoenician waw; U and V were one Latin letter until the Renaissance split them.
The Enochian letter Vau is transliterated as Latin V. A secondary value. The Dee tables use one sign for this letter and its primary Latin equivalent, so the two Latin letters share a single Enochian character.
W is a late medieval ligature of two V (or U) shapes, formed to write the Germanic w sound once Latin V had hardened to a v sound.
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996the chapter on the Italic alphabetsView the Source 2. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997the chapters on Pythagoras, on Neopythagoreanism and on Mrs. L. Dow BalliettView the Source 3. Cheiro's Book of Numbers
Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z
David Sacks, Broadway Books, 2004The chapter on the letter VView the Source Latin Alphabet (Omniglot Writing-Systems Reference)
Simon Ager, OmniglotThe Latin alphabet, on its Phoenician, Greek and Etruscan descentView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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