The History of the Latin Alphabet

There was just one letter for all three of those sounds in the Latin alphabet. Over time, scribes and later printers began to distinguish the curvy shape of the letter from the angular shape. The two different shapes of the original letter became distinct letters, U and V. But even though that distinguished the V sound, the U sound still represented the W sound. To distinguish the U sound from the W sound, later scribes would simply put two U's together. After all, U plus U equals W.