History

The Etruscans were the inventors of this digraph; F on its own stood for /w/ in Etruscan as in Greek (where the letter F,called Digamma in Greek, has disappeared due to the fact that the /w/ phoneme itself disappeared.) The origin of F is the Semitic letter wâw that also represented /w/ and originally probably represented a hook or a club.

The minuscule f is not to be confused with ſ, the archaic long s (or medial s). For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "ſinfulneſs" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the end of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with f.

Phonetic use

In English, F represents the voiceless labiodental fricative ('f' in IPA), although in certain words, such as "of", it can be a voiced labiodental fricative ('v' in IPA). The digraph "ff", pronounced 'f', is often used at the end of words (and, in rare personal or placenames, at the beginning). Both initial and final F are commonly used with other discrete consonants.

In other languages, F can take on different values, such as 'ɸ' (voiceless bilabial fricative) in Spanish and Romanized Japanese or 'v' in Welsh (which uses the "ff" digraph for IPA 'f'). Different digraphs can also be used, such as "pf" in German for the affricate formed by 'p' and 'f'.

Alternate representations

Foxtrot represents the letter F in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

In international Morse code the letter F is DitDitDahDit: · · - ·

In Braille the letter F is represented as ⠋ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,
XX X. ..

Computing

The ASCII code for capital F is 70 and for lowercase f is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, correspondingly.

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

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "F" and "f" for upper and lower case respectively.

Ligatures

Meanings for F