VYRNWY, a river of Wales, rising in the northwest of Montgomeryshire, and after a cir cuitous course of some 35 miles falling into the Severn on the Shropshire border. Lake Vyrnwy, not far from its source, the chief res ervoir of the Liverpool waterworks, completed in 1892, was formed by constructing a huge dam across the river valley, a former glacial lake basin, the result being an artificial sheet of water about five miles long with an area of 1,121 acres and an available capacity exceed ing 12,000 million gallons. The length of the embankment is 1,260 feet, its height 60, the length of the aqueduct to Liverpool 68 miles.
vish'ni-e vo'16 chgc, Russia, capital of a commune in the dis trict of Tver, in the neighborhood of the Tsna River Valley and 225 miles south by east of Petrograd. Cotton goods are manufactured to a considerable extent and there is a thriving trade. Pop. 17,600.
W the 23d letter of the English alpha bet. It serves both as consonant and vowel; as consonant when it begins a word or syllable, and as vowel at the end of a word or syllable, where it forms a diphthong with a vowel preceding it, as in how, grew. Its sound is that of a weak-voiced bilabial formed by rounding the lips as for pronouncing. oo,. then contracting the aperture so that the voice issues with some friction. W is silent in many words and positions; examples: gunwale, sword, two; wraP, wrong, wright. W may be derived from primitive Indo-Germanic v or gh. Wh is usu ally derived from kv. Words beginning with wh, are pronounced as though the aspirate pre ceded, as indeed it did in wntten Anglo-Saxon: thus whey, what are sounded hwey, hwat: but there is a tendency both in Britain and the United States to drop the aspirate in such words or to minimize it, so that when, what, white become w'en, w'at, w'ite: nor is this mispro nunciation restricted to the vulgar; it may be heard in the speech of the cultivated dass; but it is a vice of speech parallel to that found among the lower-class Cockneys early in the 19th century, when they confounded v with w, saying vile for while and wile for vile, varden for warden, and so on. W is silent in the
words who, whom. W in whole and in whoop is silent and intrusive, not existing in Anglo Saxon hal, hol, nor in French houper. In Ger man w is a consonant only and represents very nearly the sound of the English v, but is bilabial instead of labia-dental: hence the English forename Edward is in German written Eduard. The consonant sound of w in the Gothic lan guages is generally replaced in the Romance languages by gu; for example, Walter, Gualtier, William, Guillaume, war, guerre. Terminal ow, as in sorrow, is usually of guttural origin. The form (the letter v doubled) and the name of this consonant (double u) were both a true form and a right name in the 7th century when w first came into use. At that time — 13th century —and long after, the one charac ter v (V) stood for the consonant v and the vowel sound u (oo), and its name was oo; at the same time it was used as the sign of the consonant now represented only by v: thus, while in form w is what it is called in French, double vay, or double ve, in sound it is for us what its name in English denotes, that of double u. W in chemistry is the symbol for tungsten. See U; V; ALPHABET.