F

The f (uppercase F, noun efe, plural efes) is the sixth letter and the fourth consonant of the Spanish alphabet and of the basic Latin alphabet.

In English it represents an obstruent, fricative, labiodental, voiceless consonant sound.

History

The grapheme of this letter derives from the Phoenician letter waw, which, however, had a phonetic value [w]. From such a letter he derived the Greek digamma, which later disappeared. The Etruscans took the letter digamma although they mutated the phonemic value [v] to [f] and with this phonetic value the letter entered the Latin alphabet.

Egyptian hierophic Maza	Proto-Semitic W	Fellowship W	Greek Digamma (W)	Etrusco W	Latin F

Phonetics

F is a voiceless labiodental fricative, the graphic transcription of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA is [f].

Alternative representations

In the aeronautical phonetic alphabet it is assigned the word Foxtrot (occasionally "Florida"). In Morse code it is: ·· — ·

• 

  Signal flags

• 

  Semaphor Alphabet

• 

  Signography Braille (Spanish)

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  Manual Alphabet

Ligatures

In Germanic and Anglo-Saxon typography, particularly serif fonts, the lowercase f is one of the most commonly linked letters. Unicode creates ligatures with the letters f, l, i, and t: ff, fi, , ffi, ffl and ſt (from U+fb00 to U+fb05).

Most common f ligatures.

Computer Codes

• Unicode: U+0046, lower U+0066.
• ASCII: ISO 8859-1, uppercase 70, lowercase 102;
• In binary system 01000110 and 01100110, respectively.
• EBCDIC: capital 198, small 134.
• Entity: capital " #70; and small " #102.

Variants

• The French franc can be represented with FF or ̄ (Unicode 0x20a3).
• F capitalized batch (Unicode 0x0191, ) is used for transcription of certain African languages and f minuscule italics is the monetary symbol of the florin.
• F Chief (Unicode 0x1e1e and 0x1e1f, and ) was used by the ancient Irish Gaelic spelling.
• F has been taken to represent the (feoh) of the futhark (rúnic alphabet).
• There is also:
  • F inverted capital (Unicode 0x2132, ).
  • F lower case in brackets (Unicode 0x24a1, (f)).
  • F circulation (Unicode 0x24bb and 0x24d5, F and f).

Other meanings

• In Anglo-Saxon notation represents the note or chord fa.
• In the colloquial language of the internet the letter F is used to show respect for a tragic or shameful situation. This expression comes from the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, specifically at the initial stage of the second mission of the game, in which the protagonist, Private Jack Mitchell, attends the funeral of his best friend, who died in a war in South Korea. Because of this, the player is asked to press the F key to show respect (Press F to pay respects) if you play on PC. It usually appears mostly on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, etc. platforms.