V

This article is about the alphabetic letter. For the TV series, see V (TV series).

Latin alphabet
	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj
Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv
	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

V is the twenty-second letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is vee.

Like F and the Greek letter Upsilon (also spelled Ypsilon), V evolved from the Phoenician letter Waw. In Etruscan it was simplified to V and had the sound value /u/, but since F came to represent /f/ in Latin rather than /w/, the Romans used V for both /w/ and /u/, as in EQVVS. In some Roman handwriting styles, it was written as a modern uppercase V, while in others like uncial it resembled modern lowercase u. With the Mediaeval introduction of the distinction between both cases, the pair was written as V/u, as in Vniuersitas. In Romance languages, V came to represent /v/ which developed from /w/; Around the Renaissance, U and V were felt as sounds different enough to warrant their own letters, and a lowercase v and an uppercase U were developed. A similar evolution happened with I/J.

German W (or double u, from VV) originally was pronounced as the English letter – but has been pronounced /v/ since Middle High German times. At the same time, V was pronounced in German as in English, but the German 'Vau' soon stood for /f/ again in all positions except between vowels. (The same is probably now happening in some dialects of Dutch.) However, it is still pronounced as /v/ in German words of foreign origin.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, 'v' represents the voiced labiodental fricative. See IPA chart for English for pronunciation key.

1 Alternative representations
- 1.1 Computing
2 Meanings for V
3 See also

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Alternative representations

Victor represents the letter V in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

In international Morse code the letter V is DitDitDitDah: · · · -

In Braille the letter V is represented as ⠧ (in Unicode), the dot pattern:

X.
X.
XX

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Computing

Image:Keyboard V.jpg

The letter "V" as found on a Keyboard.

In Unicode the capital V is codepoint U+0056 and the lowercase v is U+0076.

The ASCII code for capital V is 86 and for lowercase v is 118; or in binary 01010110 and 01110110, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital V is 229 and for lowercase v is 165.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "V" and "v" for upper and lower case respectively.

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Meanings for V

Image:TheVarsitySign Atlanta-GA.jpg

Outside The Varsity, Atlanta, Georgia

"V is for Victory"
In biochemistry, V is the symbol for valine.
In chemistry, V is the symbol for vanadium.
In communication, V is the name of a hand gesture; see V sign
In computing,
- V is an operation on a semaphore, used for process synchronisation.
- V is the name of an operating system developed at Stanford University.
- V is an ITU-T series of recommendations on Data communication over the telephone network and used in their names such as V.92. See ITU-T recommendations.
In electrical engineering, V is the symbol for voltage (also known as electric potential, see below).
In finance, V is the U.S. ticker symbol for Vivendi Universal.
In grammar, v is an abbreviation for verb.
In international licence plate codes, V stands for Vatican City.
In the SI system,
- V is the symbol for volt, the SI derived unit for electric potential.
In physics, v is often a variable for speed or velocity.
As the first letter of a postal code,
- In Canada, V stands for British Columbia.
In Roman numerals, V denotes the number five (there are also separate Unicode characters for this number, 0x2164 "Ⅴ" and 0x2174 "ⅴ").
In literature, Thomas Pynchon's first novel is called V. (including the period).
In television, V (1983) is the name of a science fiction miniseries / TV series
In music,
- the roman numeral V is the dominant scale degree, chord, or diatonic function, when distinguished V = major and v = minor.
- V is the name of a band from the United Kingdom; see V (band).
- V is the name of an album released by the band Live in 2001.
- v is the name of an album released by the band 76 in 2003.
V is the name of a drink produced by Frucor in New Zealand.
A V engine is an internal combustion engine configuration.
In Windows, Ctrl-V, and Mac OS, Command-V, pastes at the cursor the contents of the clipboard.
In comics
- V is the name given by a mysterious anarchist who fights against a totalitarian government in V for Vendetta

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V

Contents

Alternative representations

Computing

Meanings for V

See also