F

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see F (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with the long s, ſ.
For technical reasons, "F#" redirects here. For other uses, see F-
sharp.

ISO basic
Latin alphabet

Aa Bb Cc Dd
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll
Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt
Writing cursive forms of F Uu Vv Ww Xx
Yy Zz
F (named ef[1] /ɛf/)[2] is the sixth letter in the modern English
alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
 v
Contents  t
[hide]
 e

 1History
 2Use in writing systems
o 2.1English
o 2.2Other languages
o 2.3Other systems
 3Related characters
o 3.1Ancestors, descendants and siblings
o 3.2Ligatures and abbreviations
 4Computing codes
 5Other representations
 6Footnotes
o 6.1Notes
o 6.2References
 7External links

History[edit]
Proto-Semitic Phoenician Greek Etruscan Roman F
 W waw Digamma V or W

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 the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another
form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,'
despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles
it in form.
After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral.
However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters
descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and
the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed,
there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an
aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) not only for the
vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving 'F' available for /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).

Use in writing systems[edit]

English[edit]
In the English writing system ⟨f⟩ is used to represent the sound /f/, the voiceless labiodental fricative.
It is commonly doubled at the end of words. Exceptionally, it represents the voiced labiodental
fricative /v/ in the common word "of".
Other languages[edit]
In the writing systems 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]. This sound is usually considered to be
an allophone of /h/, which is pronounced in different ways
depending upon its context; Japanese /h/ is pronounced
as [ɸ] before /u/.
  In Welsh orthography, ⟨f⟩ represents /v/ while ⟨ff⟩ represents /f/.
 In Slavic languages, ⟨f⟩ is used primarily in words of foreign (Greek,
Latin, or Germanic) origin.
Other systems[edit]
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨f⟩ to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

Related characters[edit]
Ancestors, descendants and siblings[edit]

 F with diacritics: Ƒ ƒ Ḟ ḟ Ꞙ ꞙ ᵮ ᶂ[3] ᵮ[4]

 Ꞙ ꞙ : F with stroke is used in the Teuthonista phonetic transcription
system[5]
 ꬵ : Lenis F is used in the Teuthonista phonetic transcription
system[5]
 ᶠ : Modifier letter small f is used for phonetic transcription[3]
 ꜰ : Small capital F was used in the Icelandic First Grammatical
Treatise to mark gemination[6]
 Ꝼ ꝼ : Insular F is used in Norse and Old English contexts[7]
 ꟻ : Reversed F was used in ancient Roman texts to stand
for filia (daughter) or femina (woman)[8]
 Ⅎ ⅎ : Claudian letters[9]
 𐤅: Semitic letter Waw, from which the following symbols originally
derive
 Ϝ ϝ : Greek letter Digamma, from which F derives
 𐤅 : Old Italic V/F (originally used for V, in languages such
as Etruscan and Oscan), which derives from Greek
Digamma, and is the ancestor of modern Latin F
 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
Ligatures and abbreviations[edit]

 ₣ : French franc, Latin capital letter F with stroke

 ℉ : degree Fahrenheit

Computing codes[edit]

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[edit]
NATO phonetic Morse code

Foxtrot ··–·

American manual Braille

Signal flag Flag semaphore
alphabet (ASLfingerspelling) dots-124

Footnotes[edit]
Notes[edit]
References[edit]

1. Jump up^ Spelled eff as a verb

2. Jump up^ "F", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); "ef",
"eff", "bee" (under "bee eff"), op. cit.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b Constable, Peter (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132
Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF).
 4. Jump up^ Constable, Peter (2003-09-30). "L2/03-174R2:
Proposal to Encode Phonetic Symbols with Middle Tilde in the
UCS" (PDF).
5. ^ Jump up to:a b Everson, Michael; Dicklberger, Alois; Pentzlin,
Karl; Wandl-Vogt, Eveline (2011-06-02). "L2/11-202: Revised
proposal to encode "Teuthonista" phonetic characters in the
UCS" (PDF).
6. Jump up^ Everson, Michael; Baker, Peter; Emiliano, António;
Grammel, Florian; Haugen, Odd Einar; Luft, Diana; Pedro,
Susana; Schumacher, Gerd; Stötzner, Andreas (2006-01-
30). "L2/06-027: Proposal to add Medievalist characters to the
UCS" (PDF).
7. Jump up^ Everson, Michael (2006-08-06). "L2/06-266: Proposal
to add Latin letters and a Greek symbol to the UCS" (PDF).
8. Jump up^ Perry, David J. (2006-08-01). "L2/06-269: Proposal to
Add Additional Ancient Roman Characters to UCS" (PDF).
9. Jump up^ Everson, Michael (2005-08-12). "L2/05-193R2:
Proposal to add Claudian Latin letters to the UCS" (PDF).

External links[edit]
 Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons
 The dictionary definition of F at Wiktionary
 The dictionary definition of f at Wiktionary

[hide]

Latin script

 History

 Spread

 Romanization

 Roman numerals

Classical Latin alphabet

SO basic Latin alphabet

phonetic alphabets

nternational Phonetic Alphabet

X-SAMPA

Spelling alphabet

Letters of 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
 Letter F with diacritics
Ḟḟ Ƒƒ Ꞙꞙ ᵮ ᶂ

 ch

 cz

 dž

 dz

 gh

 ij

Digraphs ll

 ly

 nh

 ny

 sh

 sz

 th

 dzs
Trigraphs
 eau

Tetragraphs ough

Pentagraphs tzsch

QWERTY

QWERTZ
AZERTY

SO/IEC 646

Unicode

Western Latin character sets

precomposed Latin characters in Unicode

etters used in mathematics

 Diacritics

 Palaeography
Categories:
 ISO basic Latin letters
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