Reversed V sign (two-fingered salute)

How to read it

The difference from the friendly V sign is only which way the palm faces. Richard Langworth, the late senior fellow of Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project, wrote that the V made palm in is the British equivalent of the American “one-finger salute”, and the National WWII Museum describes it as a rude gesture akin to the middle finger among working-class Britons and Irishmen. SmarterTravel lists the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Unicode encodes 🖔 REVERSED VICTORY HAND (U+1F594) as a separate character.

Also searched as: backwards peace sign, reversed victory hand, two-fingered salute, two finger salute, two fingers up, V sign palm inward.

Churchill’s V both ways

Churchill made the victory V throughout the Second World War, and sometimes made it palm in. The National WWII Museum says his aides corrected him many times; his assistant private secretary, John Colville, wrote before a visit to Liverpool that “the PM will give the V sign with two fingers in spite of the representations repeatedly made to him that this gesture has quite another significance!” According to his family and colleagues, Langworth wrote, Churchill was oblivious to the other meaning, and his former secretary Elizabeth Layton Nel said he was “astonished” when she told him what it meant.

The Agincourt story

A popular story says the gesture began with English archers at Agincourt in 1415, after the French had threatened to cut off the index and middle fingers of Henry V’s archers. The actor and archery historian Robert Hardy was sure of it, Langworth wrote. Forces News took the question to the British Library, whose assessment was that there isn’t enough evidence to link Agincourt to today’s gesture, and notes that the language writer David Wilton thinks the related “pluck yew” tale almost certainly started as a joke.