F

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.)

The lower case 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, largely to prevent confusion with f.

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 Unicode the capital F is codepoint U+0046 and the lower case f is U+0066.

The EBCDIC code for capital F is 198 and for lowercase f is 134.

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

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