From Life on a Medieval Barony by William Stearns Davis, 1923.

From When a Man Commutes by Alan Dale and illustrated by H. B. Martin, 1918.

From Handbook of Nature-Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, 1911.

From A Book of Famous Myths and Legends, Vol. Vi, 1901.

Mourning dove.  From Our Bird Friends and Foes by William Atherton DuPuy and illustrated by George Miksch Sutton, 1925.

From When a Man Commutes by Alan Dale and illustrated by H. B. Martin, 1918.

From Life on a Medieval Barony by William Stearns Davis, 1923.

From The Alexandra Readers First Reader by McIntyre & Saul, 1908.

From The Lewis Story Method of Teaching Reading and Spelling Manual, illustrated by Bess Bruce Cleaveland, 1919.

From Life on a Medieval Barony by William Stearns Davis, 1923.

"X replaces W in dorm alphabet."  From Kent State's 1955 yearbook.

Today's winged W is from West Virginia Wesleyan's 1912 yearbook.

Frankly, this is how we mustered up most of the W's for One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.  (Here's a photo of the genie bottle we use.)

The caption to this figure identifies the three w's as being written by a monkey.  The other squiggle is unidentified, but we can now reveal it to be a translation of a Sapphic fragment defined by its decline into silence.  From The Evolution of Animal Intelligence by Samuel J. Holmes, 1911.

"W is the only letter of the alphabet formed from two letters, U and U, two equals.  It is both a co-equal, and a concordant one.  In union they are the U U, the two in one, the single one" (Sir Francis Bacon's Own Story by John Elisha Roe, 1918).