F

ISO 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 (named ef /ˈɛf/, plural effs)^[1] is the sixth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

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

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 of 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/.) 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, ' 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).

Usage

In the English writing system 'f' is used to represent the sound /f/. It is commonly doubled at the end of words. Exceptionally, it represents the voiced sound /v/ in the common word "of".

In English-language online slang, "F" (with the pronunciation spelling eff) is used as an initialism for fuck. (e.g. F U, meaning fuck you). The F-word refers to the word fuck itself.

In the orthographies of other languages, 'f' commonly represents /f/, [ɸ] 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 [ɸ], but is pronounced in different ways depending upon its context. It is usually considered to be an allophone of /h/ before /u/.

In Slavic languages, 'f' is used primarily in words of foreign (Greek, Latin, or Germanic) origin.

In phonetic and phonemic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses 'f' to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

In school grading "F" stands for fail.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ƒ ƒ : Latin letter F with hook
• Ϝ ϝ : Greek letter digamma/wau, from which F is directly descended
• 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
• 𐤅: Phoenician letter waw, the original glyph

Computing codes

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

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Foxtrot	··–·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille dots-124

Footnotes

Notes

References

External links

• Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of F at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of f at Wiktionary