In many languages, its name literally means "double v": Portuguese duplo vê,[in 3] Spanish doble ve (though it can be spelled uve doble),[4][in 4] French double vé, Icelandic tvöfalt vaff, Czech dvojité vé, Estonian kaksisvee, Finnish kaksois-vee, etc.

Therefore, ⟨V⟩ no longer adequately represented the voiced labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology.

[8] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, had simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ for the same sound in the 4th century.

The digraph ⟨VV⟩/⟨uu⟩ was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba.

The digraph was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German but only in the earliest texts in Old English, where the /w/ sound soon came to be represented by borrowing the rune ⟨ᚹ⟩, adapted as the Latin letter wynn: ⟨ƿ⟩.

In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ regained popularity; by 1300, it had taken wynn's place in common use.

Another realisation (common in roundhand, kurrent and blackletter) takes the form of an ⟨n⟩ whose rightmost branch curved around, as in a cursive ⟨v⟩ (viz.

[in 5] Thus, the shift from the digraph ⟨VV⟩ to the distinct ligature ⟨W⟩ was gradual and was only apparent in abecedaria, explicit listings of all individual letters.

In Europe languages with ⟨w⟩ in native words are in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland: English, German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Walloon, Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, Resian and Scandinavian dialects.

Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh and Cornish to represent the vowel /u/ as well as the related approximant consonant /w/.The following languages historically used ⟨w⟩ for /v/ in native words, but later replaced it by ⟨v⟩: Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian Łatynka and Belarusian Łacinka.

Some Bavarian dialects preserve a "light" initial [w], such as in wuoz (Standard German weiß [vaɪs] '[I] know').

(Foreign words are distinguished from loanwords by having a significantly lower level of integration in the language.)

[13] ⟨W⟩ was earlier seen as a variant of ⟨v⟩, and ⟨w⟩ as a letter (double-v) is still commonly replaced by ⟨v⟩ in speech (e.g. WC being pronounced as VC, www as VVV, WHO as VHO, etc.).

[14] In modern slang, some native speakers may pronounce ⟨w⟩ more closely to the origin of the loanword than the official /v/ pronunciation.

In Denmark, notably in Jutland, the northern half uses it extensively in traditional dialect, and in multiple places in Sweden.

It is used in southern Swedish; for example, the words "wesp" (wisp) and "wann" (water) are traditionally used in Halland.

In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages, ⟨w⟩ is used mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed (Italian il watt, Spanish el kiwi).

[17] It is also used in internet slang to indicate laughter (like LOL), derived from the word warau (笑う, meaning "to laugh").

It is not included in the standard Vietnamese alphabet, but it is often used as a substitute for qu- in literary dialect and very informal writing.