F

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

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

History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician  waw	Greek Digamma	Etruscan V or W	Roman F
				[[File:RomanF7097809708979070970897098709870987098709709879on 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 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], which is usually considered to be an allophone of /h/ before /u/. In phonetic and phonemic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses 'f' to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative. 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 Character information 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 File:Sign language .svg File:BSL letter .svg Signal flag Flag semaphore American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling) British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling) Braille dots-124 Unified English Braille References External links Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of F at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of f at Wiktionary