The origin of ⟨F⟩ is the
Semitic letter
waw, which represented the sound . It probably originally 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)): T3 The
Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel,
upsilon (which resembled its descendant ⟨
Y⟩ but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters ⟨
U⟩, ⟨
V⟩, and ⟨
W⟩); and, with another form, as a consonant,
digamma, which indicated the pronunciation , as in Phoenician. Latin ⟨F⟩, despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from
digamma and closely resembles it in form. After sound changes eliminated from most dialects of Greek (Doric Greek retained it),
digamma was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the
Etruscan alphabet, ⟨F⟩ probably represented , as in Greek, and the
Etruscans formed the
digraph ⟨FH⟩ to represent . (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter
phi ⟨Φ⟩ then represented an aspirated
voiceless bilabial plosive , although in
Modern Greek it has come to represent .) The Etruscan digraph may have been inspired by the rare use of ⟨ϜΗ⟩ in archaic Greek inscriptions for a dialectal sound like , e.g. in the reflexive pronoun ϜΗΕ, which corresponds to Classical ἕ
hé (see ). When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used ⟨V⟩ (from Greek
upsilon) not only for the vowel , but also for the corresponding semivowel , leaving ⟨F⟩ available for . Initially, ⟨FH⟩ was also used for this sound in Latin, but the ⟨H⟩ was soon dropped. And so out of the various
vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages. The
lowercase ⟨f⟩ is not related to the visually similar
long s, ⟨ſ⟩ (or
medial s). The use of the
long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ⟨f⟩ when using a short mid-bar. == Use in writing systems ==