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 Xx Yy Zz

F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff^[1] (pronounced /ɛf/).

Contents 1 History 2 Codes for computing 3 Ligatures 4 Variants of F 5 See also 6 References

[ 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

Alternative representations of F

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Foxtrot		··–·
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

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).

[ 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

• Ф, ф - Ef (Cyrillic)

[ References

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	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter F with diacritics ḞḟƑƒᵮᶂ Two-letter combinations Fa Fb Fc Fd Fe Ff Fg Fh Fi Fj Fk Fl Fm Fn Fo Fp Fq Fr Fs Ft Fu Fv Fw Fx Fy Fz FA FB FC FD FE FF FG FH FI FJ FK FL FM FN FO FP FQ FR FS FT FU FV FW FX FY FZ Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations     F0 F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9     0F 1F 2F 3F 4F 5F 6F 7F 8F 9F     history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters