F, the sixth letter of the English alphabet, comes from the sixth pictographic letter of Phoenicia. This letter looks like today's English letter Y, which stands for cork or stud. Its name is waw in Phoenician and Hebrew. In the Middle Ages, the left cheek of a felon was usually marked with an F as a symbol of punishment.

F is pronounced [ef] in Latin, English, German and French, and ['efe] in Spanish. ?

The letter F is the descendant of the letter V, and F's relatives are U, W and Y..

The Greeks changed the word waw of semu into two forms. The first form (1) is called upsilon, and its vowel letter is u. The other form (2) is called digamma and pronounced w. This symbol disappeared in Greece, but it appeared in Latin because the Romans needed a symbol to represent their vowel F. Several forms of this symbol (3 and 4) are used in Italy. This symbol has been applied to English without change from Latin capital letters.