This article is on the letter. For other uses, see Wynn (disambiguation).

Wynn () (also spelled Wen) is a letter of the old English alphabet. It was used to represent the sound .

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn (ᚹ) for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use (perhaps under the influence of French orthography) during the Middle English period, circa 1300 (Freeborn 1992:25). It was replaced with once again, from which the modern developed.

The name of the rune, meaning "joy, bliss", is known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem:

enne bruceþ, ðe can eana lyt

sares and sorge and him sylfa hæfþ

blæd and blysse and eac byrga geniht.

Bliss he enjoys who knows not suffering,

sorrow nor anxiety, and has

prosperity and happiness and a good enough house.

It is not continued in the Young Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as wunjô "joy".

It is the only rune other than þ to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet).

As with þ, wynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century the usual practice has been to substitute the modern instead due to its visual resemblance to P.

Wynn in Unicode

References

• Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.

Old English language | Runes | Uncommon Latin letters

ᚹ | Wynn (lizherenn) | Wunjo | Wynn | Ƿ | Ƿ | Ƿ | Вуньо