Latin Small Letter V
Historically inseparable from 'u', lowercase 'v' was not recognized as a distinct letter until the early modern period — for centuries, Latin used a single character for both the vowel and consonant sounds. Now the twenty-second letter of the Latin alphabet, it appears in roughly 1 % of characters in typical English corpora, representing the voiced labiodental fricative /v/. Its ASCII code point is 118 (0x76), positioned 32 above its uppercase counterpart 'V' at 86 (0x56), maintaining the single-bit case offset (bit 5) shared by all ASCII A–Z / a–z pairs.
Technical Details
Code Example
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// Version macros#define VERSION "v1.2.3"#define VERSION_MAJOR 1#define VERSION_MINOR 2#define VERSION_PATCH 3
Common Usage
Vertical tab escape: In C-style string syntax, '\v' represents the vertical tab character (ASCII 11, U+000B) — a legacy control character originally used to advance paper in line printers. While rarely encountered in modern text, it can cause unexpected behavior in parsers that do not account for it. In PCRE and Perl, the regex shorthand \v matches vertical whitespace characters including vertical tab, line feed, and carriage return.
Version prefix convention: In software development, 'v' is the near-universal prefix for version identifiers — v1.0, v2.3.1, v4.0-beta. It appears in Git tags, GitHub release names, semantic versioning references, and package manager metadata. While purely conventional and not mandated by the Semantic Versioning specification itself, the prefix is so widespread that many tools accept or strip it automatically.
The u/v split: Until roughly the 17th century, 'v' and 'u' were not separate letters — Latin carved 'V' for both the vowel /u/ and the consonant /w/. The rounded form 'u' began as a scribal variant used in the middle of words, with 'v' retained at word beginnings. This positional convention gradually hardened into a phonetic one, giving English and other European languages two distinct letters from a single ancestor.
Diacritical variants: ṿ (dot below) appears in scholarly transliteration of Hebrew to distinguish vet (fricative /v/) from bet (stop /b/), and in romanization schemes for several other Semitic languages. ṽ (tilde) occurs in some indigenous-language orthographies of South America. Overall, 'v' has a relatively small diacritical family compared to most other consonants.
Vertical tab escape: In C-style string syntax, '\v' represents the vertical tab character (ASCII 11, U+000B) — a legacy control character originally used to advance paper in line printers. While rarely encountered in modern text, it can cause unexpected behavior in parsers that do not account for it. In PCRE and Perl, the regex shorthand \v matches vertical whitespace characters including vertical tab, line feed, and carriage return.
Version prefix convention: In software development, 'v' is the near-universal prefix for version identifiers — v1.0, v2.3.1, v4.0-beta. It appears in Git tags, GitHub release names, semantic versioning references, and package manager metadata. While purely conventional and not mandated by the Semantic Versioning specification itself, the prefix is so widespread that many tools accept or strip it automatically.
The u/v split: Until roughly the 17th century, 'v' and 'u' were not separate letters — Latin carved 'V' for both the vowel /u/ and the consonant /w/. The rounded form 'u' began as a scribal variant used in the middle of words, with 'v' retained at word beginnings. This positional convention gradually hardened into a phonetic one, giving English and other European languages two distinct letters from a single ancestor.
Diacritical variants: ṿ (dot below) appears in scholarly transliteration of Hebrew to distinguish vet (fricative /v/) from bet (stop /b/), and in romanization schemes for several other Semitic languages. ṽ (tilde) occurs in some indigenous-language orthographies of South America. Overall, 'v' has a relatively small diacritical family compared to most other consonants.