F

For technical reasons, "F#" redirects here. For the programming language, see F Sharp (programming language). For F♯, see F-sharp. For the Godspeed album, see F♯A♯∞.

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see F (disambiguation).

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

Cursive script 'f' and capital 'F'

F (named ef /ˈɛf/) is the sixth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician  waw	Etruscan V or W	Greek Digamma	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 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/.) 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).

F

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

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Foxtrot	··–

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

External links

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

The 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
Letter F with diacritics
Ḟḟ	Ƒƒ	ᵮ	ᶂ
Related
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 List of letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode