F

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The letter F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is ef, spelled eff when used as a verb (both pronounced Template:IPA).

Contents 1 History 2 Phonetic use 3 Keyboards and Computing 4 Ligatures 5 Meanings for F 6 Variants of F 7 See also

History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician W	Etruscan W	Greek W
Image:Proto-semiticW-01.png	Image:PhoenicianW-01.png	Image:EtruscanF-01.png	Image:GreekDigamma-01.png

The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /v/, and originally probably represented either a "hook" or a "club". It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that for "mace": <hiero>T3</hiero>

The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, Y, but was also ancestor to our 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. (In later Greek, this phoneme disappeared, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only).

In Etruscan, F also stood for /w/; however, they came up with the innovation of using the digraph FH to represent the sound /f/, and the letter acquired this sound on its own when the Romans picked it up (since they had already borrowed U independently from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/).

The minuscule f is not to be confused with Template:IPA, the archaic long s (or medial s). For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "Template:IPA" 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 (Template:IPA in IPA), although in certain words, such as "of", it can be a voiced labiodental fricative (Template:IPA in IPA). The digraph "ff", pronounced Template:IPA, 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 Template:IPA (voiceless bilabial fricative) in Romanized Japanese or Template:IPA in Welsh (which uses the "ff" digraph for IPA Template:IPA). Different digraphs can also be used, such as "pf" in German for the affricate formed by Template:IPA and Template:IPA.

Keyboards and Computing

{{Letter |NATO=Foxtrot |Morse=··–· |Character=F6 |Braille=⠋ }}

F key on keyboards

The F key is a typical reference key for touch typing.

F character codes

In Unicode the capital F codepoint is U+0046, the lowercase f codepoint U+0066.

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 "&#70;" and "&#102;" for upper and lower case respectively.

Ligatures

Image:Ligature drawing.png In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule f is one of the most commonly ligated letters. Unicode provides the following ligatures of f, l and i: ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl (U+fb00 through U+fb04).

Meanings for F

• In acoustics, F is the abbreviation for the formant that ordered with its frequency from low to high.
• In astronomy,
  • F stands for a March 16 through 31 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (e.g. D/1993 F2, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9) or asteroid (e.g. Template:Mpl).
• In the atmosphere of Earth, the F layer is part of the ionosphere.
• In biochemistry, F is the symbol for phenylalanine.
• In calendars, F is often an abbreviation for Friday, or for February.
• In chemistry, F is the symbol for fluorine.
• In communications, F sometimes stands for fax number.
• In computer science, the F programming language is a subset of Fortran 95, intended for educational and scientific use.
• In education, F is a failing grade.
• In electronics, an F connector (i.e. used for inlet in cable modems). See http://www.marine-electronics.net/techarticle/coax/f-con.htm
• In finance, F is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for Ford Motor Company.
• In grammar, f is often an abbreviation for female, the grammatical gender.
• In forms and personal documents, F is often used as an abbreviation for female.
• F or f (eventually followed by a period) are an alternative to the vulgar word fuck.
• In international licence plate codes, F stands for France.
• In mathematics, F is a digit meaning fifteen in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 16 or greater.
• In meteorology, F is the abbreviation for the Fujita-Pearson Tornado Scale that classifies tornadoes according to damage and associated wind speeds (F0 through F5).
• In the SI system,
  • F is the symbol for farad, the SI derived unit for electric capacitance.
  • f, femto, is the SI prefix meaning 10^-15.
• In music,
  • F is a note.
  • f is a notation for forte.
• In optics, f denotes the focal length.
• In photography, f denotes the focal length or the f-number.
• In physics,
  • F represents the Faraday constant.
  • f is a common variable name for frequency.
  • F is used to indicate focal point, such as in concave mirrors.
  • F is used to represent force as in the equation F = m · a.
• In printing, f. is an abbreviation for folio (page in a book), although it is more common to see ff. as the plural form.
• In propositional logic F is the symbol for false.
• In radiocommunication, F is one of the ITU prefixes allocated to France.
• In slang, F can stand for felony. From the song "Ebonics" by Big L - "If you caught a felony / You caught a F".
• °F is the symbol for degree Fahrenheit (a single-character version U+2109 ℉ is included in Unicode, but is only there for backward compatibility and should not be used in new documents).

Variants of F

• The F with hook or script F (Unicode U+0191 and U+0192, Ƒ and ƒ) is used in the transcription of Kabye and other West African languages for the voiceless bilabial fricative. Lowercase ƒ is the currency sign for the Dutch florin (which no longer exists as of the introduction of the Euro)
• F with dot above (Unicode U+1e1e and U+1e1f, Ḟ and ḟ) is used in the old orthography of Irish
• The French Franc can be indicated by FF or ₣ (Unicode U+20a3)
• In mathematics, the script capital F (Unicode U+2131, ℱ) often represents the Fourier transform
• There also exists:
  • The turned capital F (Unicode U+2132, Ⅎ), which is a letter that the Roman Emperor Claudius attempted to add to the Latin alphabet, the "digamma inversum" (there's no "turned small f" because were no minuscule letters at that time.)
  • The parenthesized small F (Unicode U+24a1, ⒡)
  • The circled F (Unicode U+24bb and U+24d5, Ⓕ and ⓕ)

See also

Template:AZsubnavals:F ar:F bs:F ca:F cs:F sn:F da:F de:F el:F es:F eo:F fr:F gl:F ko:F hr:F id:F it:F he:F kw:F la:F hu:F nl:F ja:F no:F nn:F pl:F pt:F ro:F ru:F (буква) sq:F simple:F sl:F fi:F sv:F tl:F vi:F to:F tr:F yo:F zh:F