F


F or f is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is ef, plural efs.

History

The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or. Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as : 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 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, as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent. When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' not only for the vowel, but also for the corresponding semivowel, leaving 'F' available for. And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan 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". F is the twelfth 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.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

In mathematics

An italic letter is conventionally used to denote an arbitrary function. See also f with hook.

Other uses

The letter F has become an Internet meme, where it is used to pay respects. This use is derived from the 2014 video game , 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.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Other representations