So why do we put up with a letter whose name is longer than many of the words it stands for? Well, because that’s the way it’s always been. At least, that’s the way it’s always been since “w” came into the English alphabet. Or rather, came back into the English alphabet. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was originally developed in the 7th century to distinguish the Anglo-Saxon w from the Latin v, which was once pronounced in the same way but had by then acquired the value it has in modern English: v. Anglo-Saxon scribes accordingly doubled the Latin letter to represent the Ænglisc sound: vv. V played the role of both vowel and consonant in those days and had the same name, yu, as the vowel, U u, it would eventually give rise to.* And so the new double-letter was logically enough called double-yu.
VV was then replaced in English by a runic letter called “wyn” or “wen”, but took up new employment overseas in German dialects and French, where it become a single new letter, W, rather than a doubling of an old one (VV). Its name remained the same, however, and come the Norman Conquest, Norman scribes brought it and its name back into English, where it has remained ever since: a letter whose name takes longer to pronounce than many of the words it stands for. Than most of the words it stands for: /w/ is a native sound in English and most of the words it begins are simple Anglo-Saxon mono- or disyllables: world; with; what; water; and so on.
So why do we put up with it? One reason is that the acronym w, cumbersome as it is in speech, is certainly effective in writing. “World Wildlife Fund” is seventeen letters long; WWF is three. That is a great advantage for writers and graphic designers and though “World Wildlife Fund” is four syllables and WWF seven, WWF gains in phonetic simplicity what it loses in syllabification: in other words, it’s just about as easy to say as “World Wildlife Fund” (try it).
The same is not true of “That Was The Week That Was”, a famous British satirical TV program in the 1960s, and its acronym, TWTWTW – six syllables vs twelve – but Britain was not the entire English-speaking world and the acronym TW3 was used instead anyway. But now there is a W acronym that affects the entire English-speaking world, and all the rest of the world too: www, or World Wide Web, which is, as already noted, nine syllables vs three. This wouldn’t matter so much if www remained written more much than it was spoken, but it doesn’t: it is spoken almost every time someone gives a standard web address over the radio or telephone or confirms one on TV.
A little thought might have avoided the problem: the World Wide Web could have been called the International Electronic Network, or the convention could have been established that “www.” was pronounced “world wide web dot”. But the other name would have been far less snappy – “World Wide Web” has crisp Anglo-Saxon simplicity – and the convention would have resulted in confusion and expensive mistakes as people learnt it. “World Wide Web” is a good alliterative name and “www” a good triple acronym, except when it is spoken aloud.
So perhaps it’s time to close the stable door after the horse has bolted: “World Wide Web” can’t be recalled and neither can “www”, but we can certainly start to pronounce “www” differently. Every other letter in English has a monosyllabic name, so why not “w”? Why not pronounce it simply wu? Unlike the spelling reform many people urge us to adopt for English, it would cost nothing and make nothing obsolete: acronyms like www and WWF (which stands for World Wrestling Federation today too) would remain unchanged in writing, just be spoken differently: more easily and quicker: wu wu wu and wu wu eff. Gradually films and television programs from pre-wu days would provoke amused titters or puzzled frowns whenever a character used the old pronounciation, but I don’t think that would affect many films or many scenes in the films it did affect.
And why would there be amused titters? Because we often titter with amusement when we watch people from the past doing things in clumsy, inefficient ways that we have now discarded.