Wyn

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for joy or delight ; the Old English runic letter ƿ, used to represent the w sound
2. Old-fashioned word meaning happiness or gladness ; a rune from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet that stood for the w sound
3. Joy or pleasure in older English ; the runic character ƿ from the Old English futhorc used to write the w sound

Etymology: The letter "wyn" was once a working part of the alphabet. Old English scribes used a rune, a character from the older runic script, to write a sound that modern English has lost, and the letter's name was simply the word for "joy." Runes were named after words that began with their sound, so the rune's name was the same word that gave us "wyn" in the first place, meaning joy or pleasure. That Old English word, "wynn," traces back to a Proto-Germanic form, "wunjō," and further to an Indo-European root meaning desire, wish or love. The sense of the word was therefore built around wanting and delight rather than around any letter or sound. The word survived in English mainly as the name of this rune and as a spelling variant, "wynn" or "wyn," in older writing. Its surprising career is as a letter: a word for pleasure that spent centuries as a symbol on the page.

Synonyms: joy, delight, bliss