F | |
---|---|
F f | |
(See below) | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic |
Language of origin | Latin language |
Phonetic usage | [f] [ɸ~h] [ʍ~xʷ] [v] /ɛf/ |
Unicode codepoint | U+0046, U+0066 |
Alphabetical position | 6 Numerical value: 6 |
History | |
Development | |
Time period | ~-700 to present |
Descendants | • Ḟ • ₣ • ℉ • ꟻ • ꬵ • ∫ • 𝆑 |
Sisters | U V W Y Ʊ Ϝ У Ў Ұ Υ υ ו וּ וֹ و ۋ ܘ ࠅ 𐎆 𐌖 Վ վ Ո ո Ւ ւ և |
Transliteration equivalents | U V W Y |
Variations | (See below) |
Other | |
Other letters commonly used with | f(x) |
Associated numbers | 6 |
|
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is ef[1] (pronounced /ˈɛf/), and the plural is efs.[2]
Proto-Semitic W | Phoenician waw | Greek Digamma | Etruscan V or W | Latin F |
---|---|---|---|---|
The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter waw that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace (transliterated as ḥ(dj)):
|
The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,' despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles it in form.
After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.) When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) not only for the vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving 'F' available for /f/. And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.
The lowercase 'f' is not related to the visually similar long s, 'ſ' (or medial s). The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with 'f' when using a short mid-bar.
In the English writing system ⟨f⟩ is used to represent the sound /f/, the voiceless labiodental fricative. It is often doubled at the end of words. Exceptionally, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in the common word "of". F is the twelfth least frequently used letter in the English language (after C, G, Y, P, B, V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 2.23% in words.
In the writing systems of other languages, ⟨f⟩ commonly represents /f/, [ɸ] or /v/.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨f⟩ to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.
An italic letter f is conventionally used to denote an arbitrary function. See also f with hook (ƒ).
A bold italic letter f is used in musical notation as a dynamic indicator for "loud or strong". It stands for the Italian word forte.[3][4]
In countries such as the United States, the letter "F" is defined as a failure in terms of academic evaluation. Other countries that use this system include Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and the Netherlands.
The letter F has become an Internet meme, where it is used to pay respects. This use is derived from the 2014 video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, where in a quick-time event protagonist Jack Mitchell must pay his respects to his friend Will Irons who fell in combat in a previous mission, represented by the player pressing F when playing the PC version. People on the Internet use the letter F usually in a genuine way to express respects, sadness or condolences towards other Internet personalities, Internet memes or other players on certain events, such as death, misfortune or the end of a phenomenon, company, game, series, etc.[5]
Preview | F | f | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F | LATIN SMALL LETTER F | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 70 | U+0046 | 102 | U+0066 |
UTF-8 | 70 | 46 | 102 | 66 |
Numeric character reference | F | F | f | f |
EBCDIC family | 198 | C6 | 134 | 86 |
ASCII 1 | 70 | 46 | 102 | 66 |
NATO phonetic | Morse code |
Foxtrot | ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ |
Signal flag | Flag semaphore | American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling) | Braille dots-124 Unified English Braille |