F
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F (named ef[1] /ˈɛf/)[2] is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History
| Proto-Semitic W |
Phoenician waw |
Greek Digamma |
Etruscan V or W |
Roman F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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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)):
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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 resembled 'F', but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (After /w/ disappeared from Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral.)
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).
Use in writing systems
English
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
In the writing systems 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 standard speech this is realized as [f] but a common nonstandard pronunciation is [ɸ]. It may merge with /x/ before /w/ in some dialects. See Spanish phonology.
- In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, ⟨f⟩ is used to represent [ɸ]. 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 [ɸ] 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
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨f⟩ to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.
Other uses
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 school grading "F" stands for Fail.
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
- 𐤅: Semitic letter Waw, from which the following symbols originally derive
- Ϝ ϝ : Greek letter Digamma, from which F derives
- 𐌅 : 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
- F with diacritics: Ƒ ƒ Ḟ ḟ
Ligatures and abbreviations
- ₣ : French franc, Latin capital letter F with stroke
- ℉ : degree Fahrenheit
Computing codes
| 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
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