F or f is the sixth letter of the modern English alphabet and the basic Latin ISO alphabet. Its English name is ef (pronounced / ˈɛf /), plural efs.

The origin “F” is the Semitic letter waw, which represents a sound like / v / or / w /. Graphically, it originally described either a hook or a club. It can be based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as the one representing the word mace (transliterated as ace (dj)):

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The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted in Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant “Y,” but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters “U,” “V” and “W”); and in another form, as a consonant, a digamma, denoting the pronunciation / w /, as in Phoenician. The Latin “F,” although pronounced differently, eventually comes from a digamma and has a very similar shape.

After eliminated the / w / sound changes from spoken Greek, the digamma was used only as a number. However, the Greek alphabet gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these preserved letters are derived from the digam. In the Etruscan alphabet, “F” probably represents / w /, as in Greek, and the Etruscans form the digraph “FH” to represent / f /. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter representing / f /: the Greek letter phi ‘Φ’ then represented an aspirated bilateral plosia without the voice/ph/, although in Modern Greek, it came to represent / f /.) When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used “V” (from the Greek upsilon) not only for the vowel / u /but also for the corresponding semivowel / w /, leaving “F” available for / f /. And so, from the various variants of vav in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet, attached to a sound that its predecessors in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.

The lower case letter “f” is not associated with visually similar longs, “s” (or medial s). The use of longs largely disappeared in the early nineteenth century, especially to prevent confusion with “f” when using a short mid-bar.

The letter F has become an Internet meme in which it is used to pay respects. This use is derived from the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare from 2014, wherein a quick event the main character Jack Mitchell must pay tribute to his friend Will Irons, who fell in a battle in a previous mission, presented the player by pressing F when playing the computer version. People on the Internet usually use the letter F in a real way to express their respect, sadness, or condolences to other Internet personalities, Internet memes, or other players at certain events, such as death, misfortune, or the end of a phenomenon, company, game, series and so on.

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