How the world
names the letter W

Reading the map

• Regions, not borders. Fill colour shows the name-type; the key below names each region. Borders inside a region are softened on purpose. Where a language boundary cuts through a country, the map follows the language: Québec is drawn in teal (double vé) against an Anglosphere-red Canada, and bilingual New Brunswick is striped.
• Scale caveat. The same logic applies inside Belgium (gold Flanders, teal Wallonia, striped Brussels) and Switzerland (teal Romandie and Ticino, striped bilingual Fribourg/Valais, gold elsewhere) — but at world scale they're a few pixels wide, so the splits are visible mainly on hover. Italy's South Tyrol is left aggregated because the region-level admin data doesn't separate it from Trentino.
• Portuguese “dáblio” (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique…) is filed under “double U” because it is a nativised borrowing of the English name.
• Spanish standard is uve doble / doble ve (double V), but several places say doble u in everyday speech. The RAE names Mexico and “some Central American and Caribbean countries” — so Mexico is shown striped (both names), while the rest of Spanish Latin America is left teal pending firmer per-country evidence.
• Grey land = the writing system has no native W (Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai…); W appears only in loanwords.