F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( ) is spelled ef or eff.

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": T3

The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, Y, but was also ancestor to Roman 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. (Later on, this /w/ phoneme disappeared from Greek, 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 letter phi (Φ φ) came to approximate the sound of /f/ in Greek.

The lower case 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.

Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital F is codepoint U+0046 and the lower case f is U+0066.

The ASCII code for capital F is 70 and for lower case f is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital F is 198 and for lowercase f is 134Fact: date=April 2009.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "F" and "f" for upper and lower case, respectively.

In British Sign Language (BSL), the letter 'f' is represented as the extended index and middle finger of right hand ontop of extended index and middle finger of left hand. It should look like a cross.

Ligatures

In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule f is one of the most commonly ligated letters.

Unicode encodes the following ligatures beginning with lowercase f: ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl (U+FB00 through U+FB04). However, those characters are encoded only for compatibility with some old character code sets, and should not be used. No more typographic ligatures will be encoded. Instead, ligatures should be formed automatically from font data (see Apple Advanced Typography, OpenType, Graphite (SIL)).

Regarding ligatures starting with lowercase f, and if the style of the font requires it, ligatures for fb, ff, ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, ffl, ffr, fft, fh, fi, fj, fk, fl, fr, and ft are among those offered in fonts