wynn

noun

wynn

noun

/wɪn/

Etymology From Middle English wynne, winne, wenne, wunne, wyn, from Old English wynn (“joy, pleasure”) (runes were named using words beginning with their sound), from Proto-West Germanic *wunnju, from Proto-Germanic *wunjō, from Proto-Indo-European *wn̥h₁yeh₂, from *wenh₁- (“desire, wish, love”).

1

A letter of the Old English alphabet, ƿ, borrowed from the futhark and used to represent the sound of w; replaced in Middle English times by the digraph uu, which later developed into the letter w.

  • The Norman scribes gradually replaced wynn by u, uu, vv, and w itself.1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 175:
Related terms
eth, edh, eð, ð, thorn, þorn, þ

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.