I see a lot of people putting "W" in some articles and I don't understand what it means:(
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what does "W" mean?
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It stands for "White Shark"
The great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), also known as the white shark, white pointer, or simply great white, is a species of large mackerel shark which can be found in the coastal surface waters of all the major oceans. It is notable for its size, with larger female individuals growing to 6.1 m (20 ft) in length and 1,905–2,268 kg (4,200–5,000 lb) in weight at maturity.[3][4][5] However, most are smaller; males measure 3.4 to 4.0 m (11 to 13 ft), and females measure 4.6 to 4.9 m (15 to 16 ft) on average.[4][6] According to a 2014 study, the lifespan of great white sharks is estimated to be as long as 70 years or more, well above previous estimates,[7] making it one of the longest lived cartilaginous fishes currently known.[8] According to the same study, male great white sharks take 26 years to reach sexual maturity, while the females take 33 years to be ready to produce offspring.[9] Great white sharks can swim at speeds of 25 km/hr (16 mph)[10] for short bursts and to depths of 1,200 m (3,900 ft).[11]
The great white shark is an apex predator, as it has no known natural predators other than, on very rare occasions, the orca.[12] It is arguably the world's largest-known extant macropredatory fish, and is one of the primary predators of marine mammals, up to the size of large baleen whales. This shark is also known to prey upon a variety of other marine animals, including fish, and seabirds. It is the only known surviving species of its genus Carcharodon, and is responsible for more recorded human bite incidents than any other shark.[13][14]
W, or w, is the twenty-third and fourth-to-last letter of the modern English and ISO basic Latin alphabets. It typically represents a consonant, but in some languages it represents a vowel. Its name in English is double-u,[note 1] plural double-ues.[1][2]
History
A 1693 book printing that uses the "double u" alongside the modern letter; this was acceptable if printers did not have the letter in stock or the font had been made without it.
The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W' character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").
The sounds /w/ (spelled ⟨V⟩) and /b/ (spelled ⟨B⟩) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative /β/ between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, ⟨V⟩ no longer adequately represented the labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology.
A letter W appearing in the coat of arms of Vyborg
The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ (⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German, in the 7th or 8th centuries.[3] 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.
It is from this ⟨uu⟩ digraph that the modern name "double U" derives. 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⟩ gained popularity again and by 1300 it had taken wynn's place in common use.
Scribal realisation of the digraph could look like a pair of Vs whose branches crossed in the middle. Another, common in roundhand, kurrent and blackletter, takes the form of an ⟨n⟩ whose rightmost branch curved around as in a cursive ⟨v⟩ (viz. {\displaystyle {\mathfrak {w}}.}{\displaystyle {\mathfrak {w}}.})[4][5] It was used up to the nineteenth century in Britain and continues to be familiar in Germany.[note 2]
The shift from the digraph ⟨VV⟩ to the distinct ligature ⟨W⟩ is thus gradual, and is only apparent in abecedaria, explicit listings of all individual letters. It was probably considered a separate letter by the 14th century in both Middle English and Middle German orthography, although it remained an outsider, not really considered part of the Latin alphabet proper, as expressed by Valentin Ickelshamer in the 16th century, who complained that:
Poor w is so infamous and unknown that many barely know either its name or its shape, not those who aspire to being Latinists, as they have no need of it, nor do the Germans, not even the schoolmasters, know what to do with it or how to call it; some call it we, [... others] call it uu, [...] the Swabians call it auwawau[6]
In Middle High German (and possibly already in late Old High German), the West Germanic phoneme /w/ became realized as [v]; this is why, today, the German ⟨w⟩ represents that sound.
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