F
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F (named ef /ˈɛf/, as a verb spelled eff, forms/script: Template:J )[1] is the sixth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History
| Proto-Semitic W |
Phoenician waw |
Etruscan V or W |
Greek Digamma |
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 human, 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 'Q', 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, which 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).
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
| Preview | F | f | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F | LATIN SMALL LETTER F | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | 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 |
References
- ^ "F", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); "ef", "eff", "bee" (under "bee eff"), op. cit.
