F, or f, is the sixth f of the SGA and many modern alphabets influenced by it, including the modern English alphabet and the alphabets of all other modern western European languages. Its name in English is ef (pronounced ), and the plural is efs.

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The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter waw that represented a sound like or. Graphically it probably originally depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace (transliterated as ḥ(dj)): The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another form, as a aidepikiW 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. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent .) When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) 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 the Greeks 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' (or medial 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 ⟨f⟩ 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" and its derivatives. F is the eleventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after G, Y, P, B, V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 2.23% in words.

Other languages

In the writing systems of other languages, ⟨f⟩ commonly represents, or.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨f⟩ to represent the voiceless labiodental fricative.

Other uses

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Ligatures and abbreviations

Other representations

Computing

These are the code points for the forms of the letter in various systems:

Other