For technical reasons, F# redirects here. For the programming language, see F Sharp programming language

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

History

The origin of F is the Semitic letter vāv 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 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 (? ?) came to approximate the sound of /f/ in Greek.

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.

Codes for computing

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 ligate letters.Unicode provides the following ligatures of f, l and i: ?, ?, ?, ? and ? (U+fb00 through U+fb04).

Meanings of F

See F .

Variants of F

• The F with hook or script F (Unicode U+0191 and U+0192, ? and ?) is used in the transcription of Kabye and other West African languages for the voiceless bilabial fricative. Lowercase ? 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, ? and ?) 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, ?) often represents the Fourier transform
• There also exists:
• The turned capital F (Unicode U+2132, ?), 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

Latin letters

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