F
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- For the F# programming language, see F Sharp programming language.
- For the grade, see f (grade)
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 [ɛf]).
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History
| Proto-Semitic W | Phoenician W | Etruscan W | Greek Digamma (W) |
|---|---|---|---|
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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":
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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 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.
It also should be said that the Greeks also used Φ (φ) for the English "F" sound.
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", also represents/f/ (although at earlier times it represented a geminated [fː]), 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 Romanized Japanese or /v/ in Welsh (which uses the "ff" digraph for IPA /f/) and German. Different digraphs can also be used, such as "pf" in German to represent the affricate/pf/.
Keyboards and Computing
| NATO phonetic | Morse code | ||
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| Signal flag | Semaphore | ASL Manual | 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 "F" and "f" for upper and lower case respectively.
Ligatures
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 whitish class of stars in the Morgan-Keenan system
- 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. mpl|(3708) 1974 FV|1).
- 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 United States 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 genetics, F stands for a generation descended from a parent generation.
- 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.
- In information retrieval, F is the F-measure or balanced F-score, the harmonic mean of precision and recall
- 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.
- F is a symbol for a number in the Fibonacci Series corresponding to a given index; F(8)=21
- 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 military aviation, F- is used in the USAF designations for fighters and fighter bombers.
- 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,
- 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 radio,
- the NATO F band ranges from 3 to 4 GHz.
- 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".
- In probability theory and statistics, the F-distribution
- °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).
- F can also be a euphamism for the word fuck.
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
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