F

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

History

The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv (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 ḥ(dj)):-

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. (After /w/ disappeared from Greek, digamma was used as a numeral only.)

In Etruscan, ⟨F⟩ probably represented /w/, as in Greek; and the Etruscans formed the digraph ⟨FH⟩ to represent /f/. When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used ⟨V⟩ (from Greek upsilon) to stand for /w/ as well as /u/, leaving ⟨F⟩ available for /f/. (At that time, the Greek letter phi ⟨Φ⟩ represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, though in Modern Greek it approximates the sound of /f/.)

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⟩.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ƒ ƒ : Latin letter F with hook
• Ф ф : Cyrillic letter Ef
• Φ φ/ϕ : Greek letter Phi

Computing codes

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

Other representations

References

External links

• Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for F
• The Wiktionary entry for f