F

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see F (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with the long s, .
For technical reasons, "F#" redirects here. For other uses, see F-sharp.

ISO basic
Latin alphabet

Aa Bb Cc Dd
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll
Mm Nn Oo Pp
Writing cursive forms of F Qq Rr Ss Tt
F (named ef[1] /f/)[2] is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and Uu Vv Ww Xx
the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Yy Zz

Contents v
[hide]
t

1History e
2Use in writing systems
o 2.1English
o 2.2Other languages
o 2.3Other systems
3Related characters
o 3.1Ancestors, descendants and siblings
o 3.2Ligatures and abbreviations
4Computing codes
5Other representations
6Footnotes
o 6.1Notes
o 6.2References
7External links

History[edit]
Proto-Semitic Phoenician Greek Etruscan
Roman F
W waw Digamma V or W
The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter vv (or waw) that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically
it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a
comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace (transliterated as
(dj)):

The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its
descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another
form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,'
despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles
it in form.
After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral.
However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters
descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and
the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed,
there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi '' then represented an
aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /p/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) not only for the
vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving 'F' available for /f/. And so out of the
various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to
a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the
basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.
The lowercase ' f ' is not related to the visually similar long s, ' ' (or medial s). The use of the long
s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ' f ' when
using a short mid-bar (see more at: S).

Use in writing systems[edit]

English[edit]
In the English writing system f is used to represent the sound /f/, the voiceless labiodental fricative.
It is commonly doubled at the end of words. Exceptionally, it represents the voiced labiodental
fricative /v/ in the common word "of".
Other languages[edit]
In the writing systems of other languages, f commonly represents /f/, [] or /v/.

In French orthography, f is used to represent /f/. It may also be silent at the end of words.
In Spanish orthography, f is used to represent /f/.
In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, f is used to represent []. This sound is usually
considered to be an allophone of /h/, which is pronounced in different ways depending upon its
context; Japanese /h/ is pronounced as [] before /u/.
In Welsh orthography, f represents /v/ while ff represents /f/.
In Slavic languages, f is used primarily in words of foreign (Greek, Latin, or Germanic) origin.
Other systems[edit]
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses f to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

Related characters[edit]
Ancestors, descendants and siblings[edit]

F with diacritics:
: Semitic letter Waw, from which the following symbols originally derive
: Greek letter Digamma, from which F derives
: Old Italic V/F (originally used for V, in languages such as Etruscan and Oscan),
which derives from Greek Digamma, and is the ancestor of modern Latin F
Y y : Latin letter Y, sharing its roots with F
V v : Latin letter V, also sharing its roots with F
U u : Latin letter U, which is descended from V
W w : Latin letter W, also descended from V
Ligatures and abbreviations[edit]

: French franc, Latin capital letter F with stroke

: degree Fahrenheit

Computing codes[edit]

Character F f

Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F LATIN SMALL LETTER F

Encodings decimal hex decimal hex

Unicode 70 U+0046 102 U+0066

UTF-8 70 46 102 66

Numeric character reference F F f f

EBCDIC family 198 C6 134 86

ASCII 1 70 46 102 66

1
Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families
of encodings.

Other representations[edit]
 NATO phonetic Morse code

Foxtrot

Braille
Signal flag Flag semaphore
dots-124

Footnotes[edit]
Notes[edit]
References[edit]

1. Jump up^ Spelled eff as a verb

2. Jump up^ "F", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); "ef", "eff", "bee" (under "bee
eff"), op. cit.

External links[edit]
Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of F at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of f at Wiktionary