F

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see F (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with the letter "ſ" (Long s (ſ)).

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

Writing cursive forms of F

F (named ef[1] /ˈɛf/)[2] is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Proto-Semitic
W
Phoenician 
waw
Greek
Digamma
Etruscan
V or W
Roman F

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)):

T3

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

English

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

In the writing systems of other languages, f commonly represents /f/, [ɸ] or /v/.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses f to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

Other uses

In English-language online slang, "F" (with the pronunciation spelling eff) is used as an initialism for fuck. (e.g. F U, meaning fuck you). The F-word refers to the word fuck itself.

In school grading "F" stands for Fail.

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Ligatures and abbreviations

Computing codes

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

Footnotes

Notes

    References

    1. Spelled eff as a verb
    2. "F", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); "ef", "eff", "bee" (under "bee eff"), op. cit.
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