Digamma

Digamma is the name given by the grammarians of the 1st century to va, the sixth letter of the primitive Greek alphabet, which had become obsolete, and was only known to them from inscriptions. The name was given owing to a fancied resemblance of its form ϣ to a double gamma. Its sound was something like that of our w. It is found in Peloponnesian inscriptions as late as the 6th century B.C., but it had disappeared from the alphabet of Attica before the date of the oldest inscriptions—i.e. before the middle of the 7th century B.C., although, as Bentley has proved, it must have been in use at the time when most of the Homeric poems were composed. It appears as the letter F in the Latin alphabet, which was derived at a very early period from the alphabet of Eubœa. In later Greek, though discarded as a letter, it is retained in the form Ϝ as the numeral for 6. See the articles on F and V.