F


F, or f, is the sixth letter of the Latin alphabet and many modern alphabets influenced by it, including the modern English alphabet and the alphabets of all other modern western European languages. Its name in English is ef, and the plural is efs.

History

The origin of ⟨F⟩ is the Semitic letter waw, which represented a sound like or. It probably originally 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 : T3
The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon ; and, with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation, as in Phoenician. Latin ⟨F⟩, despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles it in form.
After sound changes eliminated from most dialects of 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, as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph ⟨FH⟩ to represent. The Etruscan digraph may have been inspired by the rare use of ⟨ϜΗ⟩ in archaic Greek inscriptions for a dialectal sound like, e.g. in the reflexive pronoun ϜΗΕ, which corresponds to Classical ἕ hé.
When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used ⟨V⟩ not only for the vowel, but also for the corresponding semivowel, leaving ⟨F⟩ available for. Initially, ⟨FH⟩ was also used for this sound in Latin, but the ⟨H⟩ was soon dropped. 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⟩. 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.

Use in writing systems

English

In the English writing system is used to represent the sound, the voiceless labiodental fricative. It is often doubled at the end of words. Exceptionally, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative in the common word "of" and its derivatives.
F is the eleventh least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 2.23% in words.

Other languages

In the writing systems of other languages, commonly represents, or.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

Other uses

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Ligatures and abbreviations

Other representations

Computing

These are the code points for the forms of the letter in various systems: