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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.
The German letter 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 this letter, which the Germans call "Vau," soon stood for /f/ again in all positions except between vowels. (The same is probably now happening in some dialects of Dutch.)
However, the letter V can still pronounced as /v/ in German words of foreign origin. An example is certain words taken into German outright from French. One French adjective has the form actif for nouns of the masculine gender, and for which German has taken the spelling activ, with the V pronounced /f/. Its equivalent form for nouns of the feminine gender is active (in French, /ak 'tiv/), which has been taken into German in the same form but pronounced /ak 'ti və/.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, 'v' represents the voiced labiodental fricative. See IPA chart for English for pronunciation key.
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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
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, respectively.
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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