The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and a drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.
Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.
(U ω U)
The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
I support your campaign. Other candidates: wa, weh, wu
In German its „weh“. But then V is „phau“, so its not as easy to confuse as in English.
Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead
In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a few million people on your side.
Counterpoint: Ypsilon.
Stupid, but related amusing nostalgia:
By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and a drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.
Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.