و wāw or wāʼo
و wāw or wāʼo, is the thirty-third letter of the Urdū alphabet (the thirtieth of the Persian, and the twenty-sixth of the Arabic alphabet). As a consonant (that is to say, when it stands at the beginning of a word or syllable) it has the sound of the English w (or, occasionally, of v), and corresponds to व wa or va, the twenty-ninth consonant of the Nāgarī or Hindī alphabet. This letter is very commonly interchanged with b; for all words therefore beginning with w or v, but not found in the following pages, see under the letter b. The letter wāʼo not beginning a word or syllable is termed ḥarf-ě-ʻillat, 'a weak letter,' and serves with the vowel-points ẓamma and fatḥa written over the preceding consonant to form the long vowels ū and o and the diphthong au, as has been shown at the commencement of this work. In reckoning by abjad (q.v.), the letter wāʼo stands for 6; and in ephemerides it represents Friday, and the sign Libra.
