Derived letters

With an additional triple dot diacritic above waw, the letter then named ve is used to represent distinctively the consonant /w/ in Arabic-based Uyghur,^[3] Kazakh and Kyrgyz.^[4]

/o/ in Kurdish,^[5][6] Beja,^[7] and Kashmiri;^[8] /v/ in Arabic-based Kazakh;^[9] /ø/ in Uyghur.^[3]
Thirty-fourth letter of the Azerbaijani Arabic script, represents ü /y/.

A variant of Kurdish û وو, ۇ /uː/; historically for Serbo-Croatian /o/.

Also used in Kyrgyz for Үү /y/.

/y/ in Uyghur.^[3] Also found in Quranic Arabic as in صلۈة‎ ṣalāh "prayer" for an Old Higazi /oː/ merged with /aː/, in modern spelling صلاة‎.

/ʉː/ in Southern Kurdish.^[5]

In Jawi script for /v/.^[10] Also used in Balochi for /ɯ/ and /oː/.^[11]

Other letters

See Arabic script in Unicode

Pronunciation in Modern Hebrew

Vav has three orthographic variants, each with a different phonemic value and phonetic realisation:

In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of vav, out of all the letters, is one of the highest, about 10.00%.

Numerical value

Vav in gematria represents the number six, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 6000 (i.e. ותשנד in numbers would be the date 6754.)

Words written as vav

Vav at the beginning of the word has several possible meanings:

• vav conjunctive (Vav Hachibur, literally "the Vav of Connection" — chibur means "joining", or "bringing together") connects two words or parts of a sentence; it is a grammatical conjunction meaning 'and'. It comes at the start of a word, and is written וּ before ב, ו, מ, פ, or a letter with a ְ (Shva), ו with the following letter's Hataf's Niqqud before a letter with a Hataf (for example, וַ‎ before אֲנִי‎, וָ‎ before חֳדָשִׁים‎, וֶ‎ before אֱמֶת‎), וָ sometimes before a stress and וְ‎ in any other case. This is the most common usage.
• vav consecutive (Vav Hahipuch, literally "the Vav of Reversal" — hipuch means "inversion"), mainly biblical, is commonly mistaken for the previous type of vav; it indicates consequence of actions and reverses the tense of the verb following it:
  • when placed in front of a verb in the imperfect tense, it changes the verb to the perfect tense. For example, yomar means 'he will say' and vayomar means 'he said';
  • when placed in front of a verb in the perfect, it changes the verb to the imperfect tense. For example, ahavtah means 'you loved', and ve'ahavtah means 'you will love'.

(Note: Older Hebrew did not have "tense" in a temporal sense, "perfect," and "imperfect" instead denoting aspect of completed or continuing action. Modern Hebrew verbal tenses have developed closer to their Indo-European counterparts, mostly having a temporal quality rather than denoting aspect. As a rule, Modern Hebrew does not use the "Vav Consecutive" form.)

• vav explicative

Yiddish

In Yiddish,^[13] the letter (known as vov) is used for several orthographic purposes in native words:

• Alone, a single vov ו represents the vowel [u] in Northern Yiddish (Litvish) or [i] in Southern Yiddish (Poylish and Galitzish).^{[citation needed]}
• The digraph וו, "tsvey vovn" ('two vovs'), represents the consonant [v].
• The digraph וי, consisting of a vov followed by a yud, represents the diphthong [oj] or [ɛɪ].^{[citation needed]}

The single vov may be written with a dot on the left when necessary to avoid ambiguity and distinguish it from other functions of the letter. For example, the word vu 'where' is spelled וווּ, as tsvey vovn followed by a single vov; the single vov indicating [u] is marked with a dot in order to distinguish which of the three vovs represents the vowel. Some texts instead separate the digraph from the single vov with a silent aleph.

Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin.