F

ISO basic Laitin 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

Cursive script 'f' and capital 'F' in the U.S. D'Nealian script style

F (named ef /ˈɛf/) is the saxt letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

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

The origin o 'F' is the Semitic letter vâv (or waw) that representit a soond lik /v/ or /w/. Graphically it oreeginally probably depictit aither a huik or a club. It mey hae been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph sic as that which represented the wird mace (transliteratit as ḥ(dj)):-

The Phoenician fairm o the letter wis adoptit intae Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, 'Y' but wis an aa ancestor tae Roman letters 'U', 'V', an 'W'); an wi anither fairm, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled 'F', but indicatit the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Efter /w/ disappeared frae Greek, digamma wis uised as a numeral anly.)

In Etruscan, 'F' probably representit /w/, as in Greek; an the Etruscans fairmed the digraph 'FH' tae represent /f/. When the Romans adoptit the alphabet, thay uised 'V' (frae Greek upsilon) tae staund for /w/ as well as /u/, leavin 'F' available for /f/. (At that time, the Greek letter phi 'Φ' representit an aspiratit voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, tho in Modren Greek it approximates the soond o /f/.) An sae oot o the various vav variants in the Mediterranean warld, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached tae a soond which its antecedents in Greek an Etruscan did nae hae. The Roman alphabet fairms the basis o the alphabet uised the day for Inglis an mony ither leids.

The lawercase ' f ' is nae relatit tae the visually seemilar lang s, ' ſ ' (or medial s). The uise o the lang s lairgely died oot bi the beginnin o the 19t century, maistly tae prevent confusion wi ' f ' when uisin a short mid-bar (see mair at: S).

Relatit letters an ither similar characters

• Ƒ ƒ : Latin letter F wi huik
• Ф ф : Cyrillic letter Ef
• Φ φ/ϕ : Greek letter Phi

Computin codes

Character	F		f
Unicode name	LATIN CAIPITAL LETTER F		LATIN SMAA LETTER F
Encodins	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	70	U+0046	102	U+0066
UTF-8	70	46	102	66
Numeric chairacter reference	F	F	f	f
EBCDIC faimily	198	C6	134	86
ASCII 1	70	46	102	66

¹ An aa for encodings based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodings.

Ither representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Foxtrot	··–

		[[File:Sign language {{{fingerspelling}}}.svg|90px]]
Seegnal banner	Banner semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspellin)	Braille dots-124

Freemit airtins

• Media relatit tae F at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionar defineetion o F at Wiktionary
• The dictionar defineetion o f at Wiktionary

The ISO basic Laitin 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
Ḟḟ	Ƒƒ	ᵮ	ᶂ
Related
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 Leet o letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode