While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph ⟨uu⟩, 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 during the Middle English period, circa 1300.

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss", known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poems:[3] ᚹ Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏtsāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæfblǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.Who uses it knows no pain,sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself hasprosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter.It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter 𐍅 w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".

A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's P,[4] or Q,[citation needed] or from the Rhaetic's alphabet's W.[5] As with þ, the letter 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 ⟨w⟩.