Latin Capital Letter V
Shaped like a single downward stroke meeting at a vertex, uppercase 'V' is one of the few Latin letters whose glyph has remained nearly unchanged since its Roman ancestor. It sits at ASCII code point 86 (0x56), exactly 32 below its lowercase counterpart 'v' at 118 (0x76), maintaining the single-bit case offset (bit 5) shared by all ASCII A–Z / a–z pairs. In typical English corpora, 'V' ranks among the less frequent uppercase letters, though it gains visibility in Roman numerals, scientific notation, and version identifiers.
Technical Details
Code Example
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// Version macros#define VERSION_MAJOR 1#define VERSION_MINOR 2#define VERSION_PATCH 3// v1.2.3
Common Usage
Roman numeral value: Uppercase 'V' represents the value 5 in Roman numerals and appears in formal numbering — outlines, clock faces, regnal names (Henry V), and Super Bowl branding. Parsers handling Roman numeral input must distinguish 'V' as a numeral from its role as an ordinary letter, typically by context or explicit markup.
Scientific and symbolic conventions: In physics, italic 'V' denotes voltage (a quantity), while upright 'V' is the symbol for the volt (a unit) — a distinction enforced by SI style guides. In chemistry, 'V' is the element symbol for vanadium (atomic number 23). In mathematics it commonly labels a vector space or vertex set, and in software it frequently prefixes version identifiers (V1.0, v2.3), a convention formalized by Semantic Versioning (SemVer).
Computing shortcut and regex note: Ctrl+V is the near-universal keyboard shortcut for Paste across Windows, Linux, and macOS (as ⌘V), making 'V' one of the most physically pressed uppercase-labeled keys in daily computing. In regular expressions, 'V' carries no metacharacter role, but the escape sequence \v typically matches a vertical tab (U+000B) in most regex engines and C-style string literals — unrelated to the letter itself, yet a potential source of confusion in case-insensitive searches.
Diacritical variants: Uppercase 'V' has a relatively small diacritical family. Ṽ (tilde) appears in some romanizations of African and South American indigenous languages, and Ṿ (dot below) is used in IAST transliteration of Sanskrit and in Hebrew romanization schemes. In standard Latin-script European orthographies, accented forms of 'V' are rare.
Roman numeral value: Uppercase 'V' represents the value 5 in Roman numerals and appears in formal numbering — outlines, clock faces, regnal names (Henry V), and Super Bowl branding. Parsers handling Roman numeral input must distinguish 'V' as a numeral from its role as an ordinary letter, typically by context or explicit markup.
Scientific and symbolic conventions: In physics, italic 'V' denotes voltage (a quantity), while upright 'V' is the symbol for the volt (a unit) — a distinction enforced by SI style guides. In chemistry, 'V' is the element symbol for vanadium (atomic number 23). In mathematics it commonly labels a vector space or vertex set, and in software it frequently prefixes version identifiers (V1.0, v2.3), a convention formalized by Semantic Versioning (SemVer).
Computing shortcut and regex note: Ctrl+V is the near-universal keyboard shortcut for Paste across Windows, Linux, and macOS (as ⌘V), making 'V' one of the most physically pressed uppercase-labeled keys in daily computing. In regular expressions, 'V' carries no metacharacter role, but the escape sequence \v typically matches a vertical tab (U+000B) in most regex engines and C-style string literals — unrelated to the letter itself, yet a potential source of confusion in case-insensitive searches.
Diacritical variants: Uppercase 'V' has a relatively small diacritical family. Ṽ (tilde) appears in some romanizations of African and South American indigenous languages, and Ṿ (dot below) is used in IAST transliteration of Sanskrit and in Hebrew romanization schemes. In standard Latin-script European orthographies, accented forms of 'V' are rare.