Grammar girl here. A question I get now and then is whether W is ever a vowel.

At first I was puzzled by this question, but it turns out that grammar books from the 19th century and earlier

sometimes did include W as a vowel.

I'm not sure why grammar writers stopped doing it or when the AEIOU sometimes why that many of us learned in school became standard.

But today we're going to learn not only when why, but maybe even W can be a vowel.

Actually, here's a spoiler. They're not and neither are AEIOU and U.

So how can I possibly claim that AEIOU and U are not vowels?

The short answer is that vowels and consonants too are the actual sounds we make when we talk.

And that AEIOU and U and all the other letters of the alphabet represent those vowels and consonants.

This may seem like a picky distinction, but if you're not clear on whether you're talking about orthography or phonetics, things can get confusing.

For example, we're used to thinking of the letter U as a vowel.

As a result, countless speakers have needlessly second-guess themselves wondering whether they should write A university or N university, A unicorn or N unicorn.

A lot of confusion could have been avoided if generations of kids had just learned that U represents a vowel in words like umbrella and put.

And that it represents the sequence of the consonant Y and the vowel U in university in unicorn.

So various letters or combinations of letters are used to represent vowels or consonants.

But in and of themselves, letters are neither vowels nor consonants.

I'm sorry if that goes against what you learned in school. It goes against what I learned in school too.

But unless you're playing Scrabble or Wheel of Fortune, it really is more sensible to think about vowels and consonants this way.

Now that I've given the simple answer, let's deal with the real question.

When does W and for that matter Y represent a vowel?

If a syllable begins with Y or W and the next letter represents a vowel, then Y or W almost certainly represent a consonant.

In Yo and Wo, for example, Y and W represent consonants.

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