The letter F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is ef, spelled eff when used as a verb (both pronounced ).

History

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Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician W	Etruscan W	Greek Digamma (W)	-

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. (In later Greek, this phoneme disappeared, 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 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.

It also should be said that the Greeks also used Φ (φ) for the English "F" sound.

Phonetic use

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In English, F represents the voiceless labiodental fricative ( in IPA), although in certain words, such as "of", it can be a voiced labiodental fricative ( in IPA). The digraph "ff", pronounced , is often used at the end of words (and, in rare personal or placenames, at the beginning). Both initial and final F are commonly used with other discrete consonants.

In other languages, F can take on different values, such as (voiceless bilabial fricative) in Romanized Japanese or in Welsh (which uses the "ff" digraph for IPA ). Different digraphs can also be used, such as "pf" in German for the affricate formed by and .

Keyboards and Computing

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F key on keyboards

The F key is a typical reference key for touch typing.

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

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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 for F

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• In acoustics, F is the abbreviation for the formant that ordered with its frequency from low to high.
• In astronomy,
  • F stands for a March 16 through 31 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (e.g. D/1993 F2, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9) or asteroid (e.g. mpl|(3708) 1974 FV|1).
• In the atmosphere of Earth, the F layer is part of the ionosphere.
• In biochemistry, F is the symbol for phenylalanine.
• In calendars, F is often an abbreviation for Friday, or for February.
• In chemistry, F is the symbol for fluorine.
• In communications, F sometimes stands for fax number.
• In computer science, the F programming language is a subset of Fortran 95, intended for educational and scientific use.
• In education, F is a failing grade.
• In electronics, an F connector (i.e. used for inlet in cable modems). See http://www.marine-electronics.net/techarticle/coax/f-con.htm
• In finance, F is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for Ford Motor Company.
• In genetics, F stands for a generation descended from a parent generation.
• In grammar, f is often an abbreviation for female, the grammatical gender.
• In forms and personal documents, F is often used as an abbreviation for female.
• In international licence plate codes, F stands for France.
• In mathematics,
  • F is a digit meaning fifteen in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 16 or greater.
  • F is a symbol for a number in the Fibonacci Series corresponding to a given index; F(8)=21
• In meteorology, F is the abbreviation for the Fujita-Pearson Tornado Scale that classifies tornadoes according to damage and associated wind speeds (F0 through F5).
• In military aviation, F- is used in the USAF designations for fighters and fighter bombers.
• In the SI system,
  • F is the symbol for farad, the SI derived unit for electric capacitance.
  • f, femto, is the SI prefix meaning 10^-15.
• In music,
  • F is a note.
  • f is a notation for forte.
• In optics, f denotes the focal length.
• In photography, f denotes the focal length or the f-number.
• In physics,
  • F represents the Faraday constant.
  • f is a common variable name for frequency.
  • F is used to indicate focal point, such as in concave mirrors.
  • F is used to represent force as in the equation F = m · a.
• In printing, f. is an abbreviation for folio (page in a book), although it is more common to see ff. as the plural form.
• In propositional logic F is the symbol for false.
• In radiocommunication, F is one of the ITU prefixes allocated to France.
• In slang, F can stand for felony. From the song "Ebonics" by Big L - "If you caught a felony / You caught a F".
• In probability theory and statistics, the F-distribution
• °F is the symbol for degree Fahrenheit (a single-character version U+2109 ℉ is included in Unicode, but is only there for backward compatibility and should not be used in new documents).
• F can also be a euphamism for the word fuck.

Variants of F

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• 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 florin (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 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

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Latin letters

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