F

Latin alphabet
	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj
Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv
	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

The letter F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet.

History

F developed from the digraph FH that stood for /f/.

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 miniscule 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.

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,

Computing

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

Meanings for F

• 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 the month February.
• In chemistry, F is the symbol for fluorine.
• In education, F is a failing grade
• In financial securities, F is the stock symbol for Ford Motor Company
• In grammar, f is often an abbreviation for the female grammatical gender
• In information systems, F is often used as an abbreviation for the female sex in personal data records.
• In international licence plate codes, F stands for France.
• In mathematics, F is often used as a digit meaning fifteen in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 16 or greater.
• In the Metric 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 photography, F is the focal length (cf. F-number).
• In physics, F is usually the Faraday constant. f is sometimes the variable for frequency
• 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 temperature, ºF is degrees Fahrenheit.

See also

Two-letter combinations starting with F:

• fa fb fc fd fe ff fg fh fi fj fk fl fm fn fo fp fq fr fs ft fu fv fw fx fy fz