F - History

History

The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv (or waw) that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that which represented the word mace (transliterated as ḥ(dj)):-

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 ⟨F⟩, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (After /w/ disappeared from Greek, digamma was used as a numeral only.)

In Etruscan, ⟨F⟩ probably represented /w/, as in Greek; and the Etruscans formed the digraph ⟨FH⟩ to represent /f/. When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used ⟨V⟩ (from Greek upsilon) to stand for /w/ as well as /u/, leaving ⟨F⟩ available for /f/. (At that time, the Greek letter phi ⟨Φ⟩ represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, though in Modern Greek it approximates the sound of /f/.) And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet, which forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.

The lower case ⟨f⟩ is not related to the visually similar long s, ⟨ſ⟩. The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ⟨f⟩.