“The name actually comes from the fact that at one point the shapes of v and u were just two different ways to write the same letter, which stood for either the vowel that most Roman Alphabet languages write with ‘u’ or the consonant we now write with ‘v’. Much like Y stands for a consonant most of the time, but when we recite the vowel letters, we add at the end ‘...and sometimes Y.’ W is one of the newest letters, invented in the Middle Ages, so it was named after what it was originally: vv or uu.”
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