F

F is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the fricative /f/. Historically it is from Phoenician waw by way of the Greek digamma. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter F the digit 6; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

This atlas covers the Latin F's sound elsewhere; its shape has an unusually tangled history. The letter descends from a Phoenician sign for the sound w, which the earliest Greek alphabets borrowed twice over: once as the vowel upsilon, and once as a separate consonant letter called digamma, shaped much like a modern F, used for the /w/ sound that classical Greek eventually lost. Digamma dropped out of everyday Greek writing after that sound disappeared, surviving only as a numeral symbol, but the Etruscans, who had borrowed the alphabet from western Greek colonies before digamma's decline, kept the letter and repurposed it for their own /f/ sound, a sound classical Athenian Greek did not have.

Rome inherited digamma from Etruscan in that repurposed form, and the Roman capital F, essentially unchanged since, is a fossil of a Greek letter that Greek itself abandoned. The lowercase f, extended into an ascender and given a descender below the line in medieval cursive hands, is one of the few lowercase Latin letters that reaches both above and below the writing line, a graphic quirk it shares with only a handful of neighbours. Early printers frequently ligatured f with a following i, l, or another f into a single cast piece of type, a habit that survives as an optional typographic refinement in fine book printing today, long after the technical reason for it, avoiding clashing ascenders on adjacent metal sorts, disappeared with digital type.