F is the sixth letter in the
basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
ef or
eff.
History
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":
T3The 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 related to the visually similar
long s, ſ. The use of the
long s died out by the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with
f.
Usage
In English, F represents the
voiceless labiodental fricative; this sound is also represented by "f" in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA. F represents the same sound in most other languages written in the Latin alphabet, provided they use the letter at all; some exceptions include
Turkmen, where it represents the
voiceless bilabial fricative , and
Welsh, where it represents the
voiced labiodental fricative .
In formal
typography, particularly for
serifed fonts,
minuscule f is one of the most commonly
ligated letters. Unicode encodes several ligatures beginning with lowercase f (U+FB00 through U+FB04) for compatibility with old character code sets, but recommends that those should not be used.
Codes for computing
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.
See also
