Hwair is the name of , the Gothic letter

Gothic alphabet

The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....

 expressing the [hʷ] or [ʍ] sound (reflected in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 by the inverted wh-spelling). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature .

Name

The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by Alcuin

Alcuin

Alcuin of York or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus was an English scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York...

 in Codex Vindobonensis 795

Codex Vindobonensis 795

The Codex Vindobonensis 795 is a 9th century manuscript.It contains letters and treatises by Alcuin, including a discussion of the Gothic alphabet.It also contains a description of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc....

 as uuaer. The meaning of the name was probably "cauldron, pot"
(cf. "skull").

There was no Elder Futhark

Elder Futhark

The Elder Futhark is the oldest form of the runic alphabet, used by Germanic tribes for Northwest Germanic and Migration period Germanic dialects of the 2nd to 8th centuries for inscriptions on artifacts such as jewellery, amulets, tools, weapons and runestones...

 rune for the phoneme, so that unlike those of most Gothic letters, the name does not continue the name of a rune (but see qairþra).

Sound

Gothic is the reflex of Common Germanic }, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar } after it underwent Grimm's law

Grimm's law

Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German

Old High German

The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

 is spelled hw.

Transliteration

The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name which was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

 hv formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne

Patrologia Latina

The Patrologia Latina is an enormous collection of the writings of the Church Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers published by Jacques-Paul Migne between 1844 and 1855, with indices published between 1862 and 1865....

 (vol. 18) in the 1860s).

Computing codes

character
Unicode name	GOTHIC LETTER HWAIR		LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HWAIR		LATIN SMALL LETTER HV
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	66376	10348	502	01F6	405	0195
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	240 144 141 136	F0 90 8D 88	199 182	C7 B6	198 149	C6 95
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	𐍈	𐍈	Ƕ	Ƕ	ƕ	ƕ

Note that the Unicode name of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".