W as a Graphic Form

Unlike every other letter in the modern Latin alphabet used in English, W was never part of the alphabet Rome used; it was invented in early medieval Britain and northern France to write the Germanic /w/ sound that classical Latin had no letter for. Old English scribes first represented that sound with the rune wynn, borrowed from the futhorc runic alphabet, but continental scribes writing Latin-alphabet texts more often doubled the letter U, or its angular twin V, writing uu or vv, a practice that gave the letter its name in English, double-u, still visible today in the French name for the same letter, double ve.

The doubled-V form gradually won out over wynn in English manuscripts by the late Middle Ages and was cast as a single ligated character by early printers, fixing W as a distinct letter of the alphabet by the time of the earliest English printing in the 15th century. Because W arrived so late, it took no part in the ancient Phoenician-to-Greek-to-Roman transmission covered for the alphabet's other letters, has no Roman numeral value, and never developed the kind of ancient mystical or numerological tradition that attaches to letters with a Semitic or Greek pedigree, since no ancient scribe or grammarian ever had reason to assign it a place in such a system.