V
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
- This article is about the alphabetic letter. For the TV series, see V (TV series).
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V is the twenty-second letter in the modern Latin alphabet.
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.
German 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 the German 'Vau' soon stood for /f/ again in all positions except between vowels. (The same is probably now happening in Dutch.) However, it is still pronounced as /v/ in German words of foreign origin.
See IPA chart for English for pronunciation key.
Victor represents the letter V in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
Meanings for V
- "V is for Victory"
- In biochemistry, V is the symbol for valine.
- In chemistry, V is the symbol for vanadium.
- In communication, V is the name of a hand gesture; see V sign
- In computer science,
- V is an operation on a semaphore, used for process synchronisation.
- V is the name of an operating system developed at Stanford University.
- In electrical engineering, V is the symbol for voltage (also known as electric potential, see below).
- In financial securities, V is the stock symbol for Vivendi Universal.
- In grammar, v is an abbreviation for verb.
- In international licence plate codes, V stands for Vatican City.
- In the Metric system, V is the symbol for volt, the SI derived unit for electric potential.
- In physics, v is often a variable for speed or velocity.
- As the first letter of a postal code,
- In Canada, V stands for British Columbia.
- In Roman numerals, V denotes the number five.
- In literature, Thomas Pynchon's first novel is called V. (including the period).
- In television, V is the name of a science fiction TV series
- In music,
- the roman numeral V is the dominant scale degree, chord, or diatonic function, when distinguished V = major and v = minor.
- V is the name of a band from the United Kingdom; see V (band).
- V is the name of an album released by the band Live in 2001.
- V is the name of a drink produced by Frucor in New Zealand.
- A V engine is an internal combustion engine configuration.
- In Windows, Ctrl-V, and Mac OS, Command-V, pastes at the cursor the contents of the clipboard.
See also
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bs:V ca:V cs:V da:Vals:V el:V es:V eo:V fr:V gl:V it:V la:V nl:V ja:V no:V nn:V pl:V pt:V ro:V simple:V sl:V fi:V sv:V vi:V yo:V zh:V
