V

22nd letter of the English alphabet. Its sound is a voiced labiodental fricative.

The ancient Greeks had no /v/ sound, but in modern Greek (which has no /b/ sound) the letter beta is used for the /v/ sound. The Cyrillic alphabet (ancestor of the Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Ukrainian alphabets), which descended from the Greek, also used the Greek beta for the sound /v/, and added a new variation of it for the sound /b/.

The Roman v had the sound either of the consonant v or the vowel u. Only in the late Middle Ages was the v consistently employed for the consonant, and u for the vowel.