The letter F with a hook (uppercase Ƒ,

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

: ƒ) is a letter of the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greece, Greek city of Cumae, in southe ...

, based on the italic form of f; or on its regular form with a descender hook added. A very similar-looking letter, (a dotless ''j'' with a hook and a horizontal stroke), is used in the

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioner ...

for a

voiced palatal implosive The voiced palatal implosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J\_<. Typographically, the I ...

Regular

Ƒ is used in writing the

Ewe language Ewe (''Eʋe'' or ''Eʋegbe'' ) is a language spoken by approximately 20 million people in West Africa, mainly in Ghana, Togo and Benin, and also in some other countries like Liberia and southwestern Nigeria. Ewe is part of a cluster of rela ...

in a straight form to represent the sound , as distinct from the letter F, which represents an .

Italic

The minuscule italic ''ƒ'', also called the

florin sign The florin sign (ƒ) is a symbol that is used for the currencies named florin, also called guilder. The Dutch name for the currency is ''gulden''. The symbol "ƒ" is the lowercase version of Ƒ of the Latin alphabet. In many serif typefaces, i ...

, is used as a symbol for several currencies, including the former

Dutch guilder The guilder ( nl, gulden, ) or florin was the currency of the Netherlands from the 15th century until 2002, when it was replaced by the euro. The Dutch name ''gulden'' was a Middle Dutch adjective meaning "golden", and reflects the fact that, wh ...

, the

Aruban florin The florin (; sign: Afl.; code: AWG) or Aruban guilder is the currency of Aruba. It is subdivided into 100 cents. The florin was introduced in 1986, replacing the Netherlands Antillean guilder at par. The Aruban florin is pegged to the United St ...

, and the

Netherlands Antillean guilder The Netherlands Antillean guilder ( nl, gulden) is the currency of Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which until 2010 formed the Netherlands Antilles along with Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius. It is subdivided into 100 ''cents'' (Dutch plural form: ...

. It can be found as italic in non-italic fonts. The italic ''ƒ'' has been used to denote

mathematical functions In mathematics, a function from a set to a set assigns to each element of exactly one element of .; the words map, mapping, transformation, correspondence, and operator are often used synonymously. The set is called the domain of the func ...

, or to indicate

aperture In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture and focal length of an optical system determine the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane. An ...

in photography (e.g. ƒ/2.8) in place of the more common italic ''f'' (in

serif font In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

s) or oblique ''f'' (in

sans-serif font In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

s). It can be represented with .

Appearance in computer fonts

Older

fonts In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

and

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

s included only the

minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the Letter (alphabet), letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain lang ...

form for its use as an abbreviation.

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

includes both the

majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writi ...

and the minuscule. Because of its origin, the italic ''ƒ'' (f with a hook) looks exactly like the italic ''f'' (f) in some typefaces. Ƒ and ƒ occupy code points and in

respectively, and may be entered by appropriate

input methods An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...

. On a computer running Microsoft Windows and using the

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German. It ...

character encoding, the minuscule can be input using or . The character has been used on the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

to mean folder, in particular as part of a folder name. For example, the game ''

Bugdom ''Bugdom'' is a 1999 platform video game originally created by Pangea Software for Mac OS 9. It was included with the iMac DV 2000 and later iBook models. The Microsoft Windows version, released in 2000, was developed by Hoplite Research and ...

'', when included on some

Mac OS 9 Mac OS 9 is the ninth major release of Apple's classic Mac OS operating system which was succeeded by Mac OS X (renamed to OS X in 2011 and macOS in 2016) in 2001. Introduced on October 23, 1999, it was promoted by Apple as "The Best Internet ...

installations, was contained in a folder called "Bugdom ƒ". This usage has died out with the advent of

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

. The

Macintosh Programmer's Workshop Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) is a software development environment for the Classic Mac OS operating system, written by Apple Computer. For Macintosh developers, it was one of the primary tools for building applications for System 7.x an ...

also used the character to indicate software dependencies, from which the folder usage derived (the folder contained the files required to run the program). The character is created on the Macintosh by pressing . The character frequently appears in

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

mojibake Mojibake ( ja, 文字化け; , "character transformation") is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, oft ...

. The lead byte 0x83 appears before a

Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

character in

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunct ...

, but if interpreted as

encoding, it becomes the ƒ character.

Notes

External links

Practical Orthography of African Languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:F Latin letters with diacritics

Regular

Italic

Appearance in computer fonts

See also

Notes

External links