F

'F' is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. In English it is pronounced ''eff'' .
In English, as well as in IPA and many other languages using the Latin alphabet, the letter is most often used to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative sound /f/.

Contents

History

Keyboards and Computing

Ligatures

Meanings of F

Variants of F

See also

History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician W	Etruscan W	Greek Digamma (W)	Roman F
Proto-semiticW-01.png	PhoenicianW-01.png	EtruscanF-01.png	GreekDigamma-01.png	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": T3
The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, ''upsilon'' (which resembled its descendant, Y, but was also ancestor to our 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 minuscule ''f'' is not to be confused with '', the archaic ''long s'' (or ''medial s''). For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "" 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''.

Keyboards and Computing

;F key on keyboards
The F key is a typical reference key for touch typing on QWERTY and similar layouts.
;F character codes
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

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).

Meanings of F

:''See F (disambiguation).''

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 exists:

★
★ The 'turned capital F' (Unicode U+2132, Ⅎ), which is a letter that the Roman Emperor Claudius attempted to add to the Latin alphabet, the "digamma inversum" (there's no "turned small f" because there were no minuscule letters at that time.)

★
★ The 'parenthesized small F' (Unicode U+24a1, ⒡)

★
★ The 'circled F' (Unicode U+24bb and U+24d5, Ⓕ and ⓕ)

See also