# The letter Vav



## Anne Frank

Hi there! I got interested in learning Hebrew a few days ago, so I decided to watch some Youtube videos about it.
The moment came when I needed to write the word אנחנו, but I did it wrong because according to the video I watched, the final letter looks like this:




In a book of mine I firstly saw the full Hebrew alphabet in, the letter Vav is printed like that too, but on the google keyboard, it's just like a stick, like this:



The question is simply why? I had a thought the second one could be just the handwritten version of it but how come a handwritten version of a letter turned out to be on a keyboard?... It beats me.


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## elroy

It’s just a different font.


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## slus

It is the same letter - Vav. It is used in various contexts - as a consonant it is pronounced as "V" (or "B" in Russian), as a vowel it is either "O" or "U".
There are two ways to write each Hebrew letter - block or cursive. The block type is written as the letter you have marked as "BAB" and the cursive type is just a straight line. I cannot see the second photo you attached, but I assume it is this one.


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## Anne Frank

slus said:


> It is the same letter - Vav. It is used in various contexts - as a consonant it is pronounced as "V" (or "B" in Russian), as a vowel it is either "O" or "U".
> There are two ways to write each Hebrew letter - block or cursive. The block type is written as the letter you have marked as "BAB" and the cursive type is just a straight line. I cannot see the second photo you attached, but I assume it is this one.


It leaves us with the THREE ways actually, there is also the handwriting one


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## slus

The handwriting one is the cursive one.


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## Drink

Why does the letter д sometimes have a flat top and sometimes have a pointy top, and sometimes looks like a cursive English g?

Letters can have different shapes in different fonts.


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## Anne Frank

slus said:


> The handwriting one is the cursive one.


I thought when typing we should always keep only the  print ones in mind, aren't we?


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## Anne Frank

Drink said:


> Why does the letter д sometimes have a flat top and sometimes have a pointy top, and sometimes looks like a cursive English g?
> 
> Letters can have different shapes in different fonts.


I know but how the cursive happened to be on my Keyboard? That's the question.


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## LXNDR

Anne Frank said:


> I know but how the cursive happened to be on my Keyboard? That's the question.



Not only yours, you earlier said it was a Google keyboard, this is how vav appears there on my end as well. Nun does as well. Why do them? I guess the question should be addressed to Google. But to me it seems obvious that they went for the pixel font style, in which shapes are usually simplified.


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## Anne Frank

LXNDR said:


> Not only yours, you earlier said it was a Google keyboard, this is how vav appears there on my end as well. Nun does as well. Why do them? I guess the question should be addressed to Google. But to me it seems obvious that they went for the pixel font style, in which shapes are usually simplified.


So you guess it's just kind of technical stuff?


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## Egmont

Anne Frank said:


> So you guess it's just kind of technical stuff?



No, it's font design stuff, for legibility on the small screen of a phone. If you look at several of the other letters, such as ש as one example, you'll see that the short horizontal strokes were omitted from all of them.


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## Albert Schlef

Anne Frank said:


> [...] but on the google keyboard, it's just like a stick, like this:
> View attachment 35030
> The question is simply why?



People here already explained, but here's some background: this "stick vav" is a distinctive feature of the *Arial* font (and its non-copyrighted variations). It was designed in 1982 based on the Helvetica font and was made very popular because Microsoft distributed it with their products. It's one of the most readable fonts for the screen, which is why the designers of your software  chose it. (On paper, however, serif fonts are more readable.)


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