Hwair

Hwair (also , , ) is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the or sound (reflected in English by the inverted "wh"-spelling for ). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature (capital ) used to transcribe Gothic.
Name.
The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as "uuaer". The meaning of the name ' was probably "cauldron, pot"
(cf. ' "skull"); comparative reconstruction shows "*kʷer"- (“a kind of dish or pot”) in Proto-Indo-European.
There was no Elder Futhark rune for the phoneme, so that unlike those of most Gothic letters, the name does not continue the name of a rune (but see "qairþra").
Sound.
Gothic ' is the reflex of Common Germanic ', which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar "*" after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is spelled "hw".
Transliteration.
The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, ƕ, which was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph "hv", which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne (vol. 18) in the 1860s. It is used for example in Dania transcription.
Computing codes.
Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".