F

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Look up F, f in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

OSI basic 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

For the F# programming language, see F Sharp programming language.

For the grade, see f (grade)

For the symbol for Fluorine on the Periodic Table, see Fluorine.

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]).

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

[edit] History

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician W	Etruscan W	Greek Digamma (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 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.

[edit] Keyboards and Computing

Alternative representations for F

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Foxtrot		··–·
Image:ICS Foxtrot.svg	Image:Semaphore Foxtrot.svg	Image:ASL Foxtrot.png	Image:Braille F6.svg
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.

[edit] Ligatures

Image:Ligature drawing.svg

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).

[edit] 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). [1]
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 and USN designations for fighters (ex. USAF F-15), FA- for fighter/attack (USN/USMC, ex. FA-18) and FB- for fighter bombers (ex. USAF FB-111).
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 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 an 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 euphemism for the word fuck.

[edit] 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 ⓕ)

[edit] See also

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Two-letter combinations
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
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
Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations
								F0	F1	F2	F3	F4	F5	F6	F7	F8	F9
								0F	1F	2F	3F	4F	5F	6F	7F	8F	9F