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 codepoint is U+0046, the lowercase f codepoint U+0066.

The ASCII code for capital F is 70 and for lowercase f is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, correspondingly.

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.

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 ⓕ)

See also

• Ф, ф - Ef (Cyrillic)
• Φ, φ or ϕ - Phi (Greek)