F

For other uses of "F", see "F" (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, F# redirects here. For other uses, see F-sharp

F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff (Template:PronEng).

History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician W	Etruscan W	Greek Digamma (W)	Roman F

The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /v/, and originally probably represented either a "hook" or a "club". It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that for "mace":

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 our letter F, but was pronounced /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, this /w/ phoneme disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.)

In Etruscan, F also stood for /w/; however, they came up with the innovation of using the digraph FH to represent the sound /f/, and the letter acquired this sound on its own when the Romans picked it up (since they had already borrowed U independently from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/). The letter phi (Φ φ) came to approximate the sound of /f/ in Greek.

The lower case f is not to be confused with ſ, the archaic long s (or medial s). For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "ſinfulneſs" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the end of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with f.

Codes for computing

class="template-letter-box | In Unicode the capital F is codepoint U+0046 and the lower case f is U+0066.

The ASCII code for capital F is 70 and for lower case f is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital F is 198 and for lowercase f is 134.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "F" and "f" for upper and lower case, respectively.

In British Sign Language (BSL), the letter 'f' is represented as the extended index and middle finger of right hand ontop of extended index and middle finger of left hand. It should look like a cross.

Ligatures

Common f ligatures.

In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule f is one of the most commonly ligated letters. Unicode provides the following ligatures of f, l and i: ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl (U+FB00 through U+FB04).

Variants of F

• The F with hook or script F (Unicode U+0191 and U+0192, Ƒ and ƒ) is used in the transcription of Kabye and other West African languages for the voiceless bilabial fricative. Lowercase ƒ is the currency sign for the Dutch gulden (which no longer exists as of the introduction of the euro)
• F with dot above (Unicode U+1E1E and U+1E1F, Ḟ and ḟ) is used in the old orthography of Irish
• The French Franc can be indicated by FF or ₣ (Unicode U+20A3)
• In mathematics, the script capital F (Unicode U+2131, ℱ) often represents the Fourier transform
• There also exist:
  • The turned F (Unicode U+2132 and U+214E, Ⅎ and ⅎ), a letter that the Roman Emperor Claudius attempted to add to the Latin alphabet
  • The parenthesized small F (Unicode U+24A1, ⒡)
  • The circled F (Unicode U+24BB and U+24D5, Ⓕ and ⓕ)
  • F is the symbol for element 9 in the Periodic Table of Elements, Fluorine

See also

• Ф, ф - Ef (Cyrillic)
• Φ, φ or ϕ - Phi (Greek)
• Voiceless labiodental fricative, a consonant sound that is the usual pronunciation of the letter F in English, and which is represented by "f" in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA
• Welsh alphabet, in which the F is pronounced as a V, or voiced labiodental fricative.

References

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