F

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 ‹F›, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, /w/ 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, mostly to prevent confusion with ‹f›.

In English, ‹f› represents the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. ‹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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