F

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For other uses, see F (disambiguation).
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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. In English it is pronounced eff IPA: /ɛf/.

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

  • 1 History
  • 2 Keyboards and Computing
  • 3 Ligatures
  • 4 Meanings of F
  • 5 Variants of F
  • 6 See also

[edit] 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":

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 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.

[edit] Keyboards and Computing

Alternative representations of F
NATO phonetic Morse code
Foxtrot ··–·
Signal flag Semaphore ASL Manual Braille
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.

[edit] Ligatures

Common f 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).

[edit] Meanings of F

See F (disambiguation).

[edit] Variants of F