wynn
Pluralwynns
- 1A letter of the Old English alphabet, ƿ, borrowed from the runic futhark to spell the sound of w; in Middle English it gave way to the digraph uu, which later became the letter w.
Editors of the poem silently replaced every wynn with a modern w.
The scribe drew a wynn that closely resembled the letter p, confusing later readers.
Note
Like every rune, it is named by a word beginning with its own sound: Old English wynn meant "joy, pleasure." So it belongs to two alphabets, a runic letter kept on in Latin script. Robert Burchfield's The English Language (1985) credits Norman scribes with displacing it gradually, by u, uu, vv and at last w itself. The plural, for counting the letters on a page, is wynns.
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Origin
From Middle English wynne, from Old English wynn ("joy, pleasure"), the name of a rune formed from a word beginning with its sound. It goes back to Proto-West Germanic *wunnju and Proto-Germanic *wunjō, from the Proto-Indo-European root *wenh₁- ("desire, wish, love").