F in Different Fonts

The letter Greek gave up

F comes from the Phoenician waw, which meant “hook” or “peg” and stood for a /w/ sound. Waw is the busiest ancestor in the alphabet: it is also the source of U, V, W and Y. Early Greek kept it as digamma (Ϝ), a letter shaped like two stacked gammas, but most Greek dialects lost the /w/ sound and dropped the letter from writing. It survived only as a numeral for 6.

Before it disappeared, digamma had already passed through the Etruscans to Rome, where it was given the /f/ sound. So F is the Latin descendant of a Greek letter that classical Greek no longer used.

Borrowed script, native everything else

F is one of the eleven letters that the mathematical script alphabet borrows from the Letterlike Symbols block. Its capital is ℱ (U+2131), the Fourier-transform symbol. The lowercase 𝒻 is native, as are all the other math styles:

Lowercase f has a descender in many script and italic fonts (𝒻 𝓯 𝑓), dropping below the baseline like a g. That’s the traditional italic f, and it’s why italic f can look taller than its neighbours. The cursive text generator puts both script alphabets side by side so you can compare. To learn the looped cursive f, which is one of the few letters with loops both above and below the line, see the cursive F page.

Small forms with gaps

F has small forms in every size, but two of them are compromises:

• Small caps ꜰ (U+A730) is from Latin Extended-D, not the Phonetic Extensions block that supplies most small caps. Its support on older systems is weaker.
• Superscript: Unicode has a modifier small ᶠ (U+1DA0) but no modifier capital F. Generators use ᶠ for both cases.
• Subscript: none.

The emperor’s turned F

Upside-down text uses Ⅎ for capital F, and it has a remarkable history. Emperor Claudius, who reigned AD 41–54, proposed three new letters for Latin. One was this turned F, the digamma inversum, meant to distinguish the consonant /w/ from the vowel u, both written V. It appeared in inscriptions during his reign and was abandoned afterward. Unicode encoded Ⅎ and its lowercase ⅎ for scholars who transcribe those inscriptions. The lowercase flip used for f, ɟ, is an IPA letter for a palatal stop.

Long s: the f that isn’t

In Fraktur and older roman type, the long s ſ looks so much like f that modern readers regularly misread it. In blackletter the difference is a tiny nub: the f has a crossbar that goes through the stem, the ſ has one only on the left or none. If you type gothic text with our Old English text generator, the letters are always the modern s and f, so you won’t create this confusion by accident.

F in the symbol styles

• ₣ (currency style) is the French franc sign (U+20A3), a real currency symbol.
• ᚠ (runic) is fehu, the first rune of the Elder Futhark, and it did stand for /f/. The futhark is named after its first six runes, and F leads them.
• 千 (Asian style) is the Chinese character for “thousand”.
• Ғ (Cherokee style) is actually a Cyrillic letter, ghe with stroke.

Frequency

F accounts for about 2.2% of English letters, close to W and G. It’s common in short function words (of, for, from), so it shows up in almost every styled sentence.