The letter W is usually paired with another letter. W is most often at the start of a word or as the second letter. At the start of a word W is usually before a vowel, except in the case of WH which we will cover later. W and vowels will also be covered later. When W is the second letter after a consonant, the usual combinations are DW, SW and TW.¹

DW at the start of a word was common in Old English and the structure survived into a few words in Modern English. The most common DW words are dwindle, dwarf or dwell and their derivatives. 

[audio 1]

WR at the start of a word was common in Old English, but the W became silent by the beginning of Modern English. Examples include: write, wrinkle, wrestle, wrist and wrong.  

SW at the start of a word was common in Old English and the structure survived into Modern English. Examples include: swing, sweet, sweat, swallow and swear. In the word sword, from the Old English sweord, the W fell silent in Middle English. Since swords were used by the nobility and they spoke French, dropping the awkward English W made the word simpler (for French speakers) to pronounce. 

[audio 2]

TW at the start of a word was common in Old English and the structure survived into Modern English. Examples include: twig, twit, twenty, twitch.... In the word two, from the Old English twa, the W fell silent and two can now be confused with to/too.

The Old English HW spelling pattern is important because it became our Modern English WH and is found in many very important words. I will cover this pattern next time. W after a vowel occurs most often at the end of a word and has an important effect in controlling the vowel, I will cover that combination in the following article.

Except for compound words, such as cobweb and halfway, WR, DW, SW, TW and WH are the usual W consonant pairs used in English spelling at the front of rootwords. 

[audio 3]

Footnotes:

1. The letter W is the also the second letter after a consonant in the Old English combinations CW and HW. Those Old English combinations are important because they create certain modern spelling patterns to be discussed in a later article.

Related Articles:

‧The Letter A a

‧AW

‧The Schwa Sound

‧B

‧CK

‧CC

‧Stranger Pronunciations of C

‧SC

‧The Letter C is Useless

‧Silent D Is Not Always Silent

‧D

‧The Magic-e

‧PH in Suffixes and Prefixes

‧The F sound: FF & GH

‧The F Sound

‧Hard And Soft G Spelling Patterns

‧Common G Spelling Patterns

‧How We Got Hard And Soft Gs

‧No English words end with the letter i?

‧Is the K Sound a C or an S?

‧Old English Spelling Patterns with K

‧Foreign spelling patterns with K

‧NG

‧The Oi/Oy Sound

‧Long U or Long OO

‧When is Initial U Short and when is it Long?

‧The Long U Digraphs

‧Magic E and the Long U Sound

‧The Letter W

‧X

‧Pronouncing The Letter Y At The Front Of A Word

‧Pronouncing The Letter Y In The Middle Of A Word

‧Pronouncing The letter Y At The End Of A Word

‧The letter Y & The Double Vowel Rule

‧The Last Letter is a Foreigner

‧The Spellings of Z

‧The name of Z

‧Silent letters and why English spelling is such a mess (1): Old English

‧Silent letters and why English spelling is such a mess (2): Fake Latin

‧I Both Love and Hate Spell-Checkers

‧The Rule: I before E, except after C

by John Larrysson [email protected]

A native English speaker who has been teaching practical English in Hong Kong for over two decades.

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NOTE: Starting in 2016, this column has been published once every two weeks, on every other Tuesday.

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