ONOMA

The letter V

Phoenician waw, through Greek upsilon.

V

origin: Phoenician waw, through Greek upsilon
carried no numeric value
in surnames: 19 / 315 (6%)
opens 6 surnames in the corpus

Roman inscriptions cut V for both the vowel and the consonant, which is why IVLIVS on a monument is the man we call Julius. It also carried the value five in Roman numerals, which is why V still means 5 on a clock face.

examples from the corpus

Alvarez · Bevan · Chavez · Davies · Davis · Evans · Glover · Harvey · Rivera · Sandoval · Silva · Sullivan · Vargas · Vasquez

Its place in the row

In the modern alphabet this letter is number 22 of 26. Before it comes U, after it W. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.

What this letter does in a name

This is a consonant: it sets the hardness of a name and how it meets the next word. In a corpus of 315 surnames this letter opens 6 and closes 0. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 6. One occurrence per surname is the ceiling: no surname in the corpus repeats this letter.

David · Steven · Oliver · Olivia · Victoria · Kevin

Letters from the same source

All of them descend from a single Phoenician letter, waw.

F

The whole alphabet

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Read a name

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