The story
- Middle English · inherited fromdoble W
- English todaydouble-u
Inherited from Middle English doble W, in reference to the letter's origins as a ligature of two Us or Vs (V originally being a typographical variant of U). The failure of the sequence /bljuː/ to simplify in this word's bisyllabic pronunciation (as in blue) is doubtlessly due to the letter U's name. For colloquial pronunciations without /l/, compare Straya.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.