U+01BF LATIN LETTER WYNN

U+01BF was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Latin Extended-B in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Lowercase Letter and is mainly used in the Latin script. It is related to its uppercase variant and its titlecase variant . The character is also known as wen.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 3 other glyphs. In text U+01BF behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Lower for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled wen, ƿynn, or ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound /w/.

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph ⟨uu⟩, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn ᚹ for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use (perhaps under the influence of French orthography) during the Middle English period, circa 1300. It was replaced with ⟨uu⟩ once again, from which the modern <w> developed.

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poems

ᚹ Ƿenne bruceþ, ðe can ƿeana lyt
sares and sorge and him sylfa hæf
blæd and blysse and eac byrga geniht. [Lines 22-24 in The Anglo-Saxon Runic Poem]

Who uses it knows no pain,

sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has

prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter. [Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)]

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter 𐍅 w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".

It is one of the two runes (along with þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter ƿynn called Vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

As with þ, ƿynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century the usual practice has been to substitute the modern ⟨w⟩ instead due to ƿynn's visual resemblance to P.