ו, the Hebrew cursive letter vav

History

ו is the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has a numerical value of 6. In traditional and modern Hebrew and Yiddish, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ as well as representing the vowels /o/ (holam) and /u/ (shuruk).

In cursive handwriting, vav is a single rapid vertical stroke, sometimes with a slight curved hook at the top, making it one of the most streamlined and frequently written letters in the script.

Because vav functions as both the conjunction "and" and a ubiquitous vowel letter, pages of cursive Yiddish and Hebrew are densely populated by single and double vav ligatures.

In Hebrew the word vav means both hook and the letter's name.^[1] The letter was originally a w, /w/,^[2] and it is the origin of Greek digamma and upsilon and of Latin F and V.^[3] In modern Israeli Hebrew some loanwords whose source has /w/ keep it,^[4] and modern texts sometimes write that w with a double vav at the start of a word,^[5] or, rarely, with a vav and a geresh, as in William.^[6] The vav consecutive, mainly biblical, reverses the tense of the verb that follows it.^[7]