F

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

F ( /ˈɛf/; named ef, as a verb eff)^[1] is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician waw	Etruscan W	Greek Digamma	Roman F

The origin of ‹f› is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the /v/, and originally probably represented either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that for the word mace:

F the Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, ‹Y›, but was also ancestor to Roman letters ‹U›, ‹V›, and ‹W›); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled ‹F›, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, /w/ disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.)

In Etruscan, ‹F› also represented /w/; however, they formed the digraph ‹FH› to represent /f/; when the Romans adopted the letter, they had already borrowed ‹U› from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/. At this time, the Greek letter phi ‹Φ› represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive, /pʰ/ though it has now come to approximate the sound of /f/ in Modern Greek.

The lower case ‹f› is not related to the visually similar long s, ‹ſ›. The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ‹f›.

Usage

In English, ‹f› represents the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. ‹F› represents the same sound in most other languages written in the Latin alphabet, provided they use the letter at all; some exceptions include Turkmen, where it represents the voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/, and Welsh, where it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/.

In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule ‹f› is one of the most commonly ligated letters. Unicode encodes several ligatures beginning with lowercase ‹f› (U+FB00 through U+FB04) for compatibility with old character code sets, but recommends that those should not be used.^[2]

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of F

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Foxtrot	··–·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In Unicode the capital ‹F› is codepoint U+0046 and the lower case ‹f› is U+0066.

The ASCII code for capital ‹F› is 70 and for lower case ‹f› is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital ‹F› is 198 and for lowercase ‹f› is 134.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "F" and "f" for upper and lower case, respectively.

See also

• Ф, ф - Ef (Cyrillic)
• Φ, φ or ϕ - Phi (Greek)

References