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.