Ƒ

Not to be confused with ʄ.

The letter Ƒ (minuscule: ƒ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, based on the italic form of f; or on its regular form with a descender hook added. A very similar-looking letter, ⟨ʄ⟩ (a turned f with a hook), is used in the IPA for a palatal implosive.

Regular

Ƒ is used in writing the Ewe language in a straight form to represent the sound [ɸ], as distinct from the letter F, which represents an [f].

Italic

The minuscule italic ƒ, also called the florin sign, is used as a symbol for several currencies, including the former Dutch guilder, the Aruban florin, and the Netherlands Antillean guilder. It can be found as italic in non-italic fonts.

The italic ƒ is, rarely, used to denote mathematical functions,^[1] or to indicate aperture in photography (e.g. ƒ/2.8) in place of the more common italic f (in serif fonts) or oblique f (in sans-serif fonts).^{[citation needed]} In modern typography an italic or oblique f is generally preferred for these applications.^{[citation needed]}

Appearance in computer fonts

Older fonts and character encodings included only the minuscule form for its use as an abbreviation. Unicode includes both the majuscule 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 U+191 and U+192 in Unicode respectively, and may be entered by appropriate input methods.

On a computer running Microsoft Windows and using the Windows-1252 character encoding, the minuscule can be input using alt+159.

The character has been used on the Macintosh (where it is created by pressing ⌥ Opt+f) to mean folder, in particular as part of a folder name (for example, the game Bugdom, when included on some Mac OS 9 installations, had the folder name "Bugdom ƒ").

See also

• African reference alphabet
• Ogonek

The ISO basic Latin alphabetv · d · e
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter F with diacritics
Ḟḟ	Ƒƒ	ᵮ	ᶂ
Letters using hook sign ( ◌̉ )
Ɓɓ	Ƈƈ	Ɗɗ	Ƒƒ	Ɠɠ	ɦ	Ƙƙ	Ɱɱ	Ɲɲ	Ƥƥ	ʠ	Ƭƭ	Ʋʋ	ⱱ	Ⱳⱳ	Ƴƴ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646

Notes

1. ^ "Latin Extended-B" (PDF). Official Unicode code chart. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf. Retrieved Jan. 17, 2009. 

External links

• Practical Orthography of African Languages