If you’ve ever listened to Persian words like /ferdowsi/نو, فردوسی /now/, or مولانا /mowlāna/ and thought,
“Wait… why do I hear something that sounds like w?”
You’re not alone.
Learners ask me this all the time, and honestly, it’s a great question.
So let’s settle it here, clearly and source-based — without turning this into a linguistics lecture hall.
First, the short answer:
Modern Standard Iranian Persian has no alphabetic letter that represents a /w/ sound.
None.
There is no letter for the English W.
Not in the alphabet, not hidden somewhere, not implied.
So if you’ve been looking for it — relax. It doesn’t exist.
Then why do we hear something like “w” in Persian?
Because what your ear hears is not a consonant.
It’s a diphthong — a glide between two vowels, usually something like o → u, which resembles English /w/ but is not the same thing.
We’ll explore this properly in this blog, but for now:
You can safely say “what I’m hearing is not the letter W — it’s a vowel glide.”
So what does Persian have instead?
Persian uses the letter و, which can represent:
➕the vowel /u/
➕the vowel /o/ in some positions
➕the consonant /v/
➕and in specific contexts, it participates in a diphthong (a glide), which some people transcribe as ow or ou
This is where the confusion begins.
Some learners assume:
“If و can sound like ‘ow’, it must mean Persian has a W.”
But no — و is not a stand-in for W. It never represents an independent /w/ consonant in modern Iranian Persian.
If Persian has no /w/, why do some books still write ‘w’ under the letter و?
Good point — and you’re right to ask it.
In Gilbert Lazard’s A Grammar of Contemporary Persian, he lists و with the phonetic values o / u / w.
So what is that “w”?
It’s not a Persian letter.
It’s not a Persian phoneme.
It’s a transcription tool used by linguists to represent the glide inside a diphthong — not an actual sound Persian speakers consciously produce as /w/.
This is a phonetic symbol, not a new Persian consonant.
We’ll unpack Lazard’s table carefully in this Blog.
Historically, Persian actually did have a /w/ sound
This is the part most learners never hear about.
➕ Old Persian and Middle Persian did have a real consonantal /w/.
➕ Over centuries, in Iranian Persian, /w/ shifted into /v/ or merged into vowel glides.
➕ So today, modern Iranian Persian uses /v/ where older stages had /w/**.
This is why Persian has و but pronounces it “v”, yet Arabic loans with و still come in with the spelling intact.
Languages change. So did Persian.
So, long story short:
In Modern Iranian Persian, there is no letter for W, and no independent /w/ consonant. What we hear as “w” is actually the vowel glide inside a diphthong like /ow/ or /ou/.
What's next?
Now that we’ve answered the clean yes/no question (“Does Persian have a letter for W?”), the next step is this:
So why do words like نو sound like now?
Understanding the Persian “ow/ou” glide.
This is where we’ll break down words like /Ferdowsi/ فردوسی, /now/ نو- read it as now in nowrooz not the now in English, /gowje/ /گوجه/, showhar شوهر and explain exactly what your ear is hearing.
Farsi or Persian? Read here.
