F
For technical reasons, F# redirects here. For the programming language, see F Sharp (programming language). For other uses, see F-sharp (disambiguation).
F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈɛf/) is spelled ef or eff.
History
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": <hiero>T3</hiero>
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 related to the visually similar long s, ſ. The use of the long s died out by the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with f.
Usage
In English, F represents the voiceless labiodental fricative; this sound is also represented by "f" in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA. F represents the same sound in most other languages written in the Latin alphabet, provided they use the letter at all; some exceptions include Turkmen, where it represents the voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/, and Welsh, where it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/.
In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule f is one of the most commonly ligated letters. Unicode encodes several ligatures beginning with lowercase f (U+FB00 through U+FB04) for compatibility with old character code sets, but recommends that those should not be used.
Codes for computing
In Unicode the capital F is codepoint U+0046 and the lower case f is U+0066.
The ASCII code for capital F is 70 and for lower case f is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, respectively.
The EBCDIC code for capital F is 198 and for lowercase f is 134.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "<tt>&#70;</tt>" and "<tt>&#102;</tt>" for upper and lower case, respectively.
Translation
The word "F" occurs as such in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Alemannic, Arabic, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Asturian, Azeri, Min Nan, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Corsican, Welsh, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Esperanto, Basque, Persian, West Frisian, Friulian, Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Gan, Korean, Croatian, Ilokano, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Georgian, Cornish, Swahili, Haitian, Latin, Latvian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Malagasy, Mazandarani, Malay, Nahuatl, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norman, Polish, Portuguese, Crimean Tatar, Romanian, Quechua, Northern Sami, Saterland Frisian, Sicilian, Simple English, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Volapük, Yiddish, Yoruba, Cantonese, Zazaki, Samogitian, Chinese.
Translation(s) in other languages: Belarusian: F, літара, Breton: F (lizherenn), French: F (lettre), Manx: Faarney (lettyr), Indonesian: F (huruf), Macedonian: F (Латиница), Dutch: F (letter), Uzbek: F (harf), Russian: F (латиница), Serbian: F (слово латинице), Turkish: F (harf), Ukrainian: F (латиниця).
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