ONOMA

The letter F

Phoenician waw — "hook", through Greek digamma.

F

origin: Phoenician waw — "hook", through Greek digamma
carried no numeric value
in surnames: 24 / 315 (8%)
opens 19 surnames in the corpus

F, U, V, W and Y all descend from one Phoenician letter, waw. Five letters of the English alphabet are the same ancestor, split five ways.

examples from the corpus

Crawford · Ferguson · Fernandez · Ferrari · Field · Fields · Fischer · Fisher · Fitzgerald · Fletcher · Flores · Flynn · Ford · Foster

Its place in the row

In the modern alphabet this letter is number 6 of 26. Before it comes E, after it G. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.

What this letter does in a name

This is a consonant: it sets the hardness of a name and how it meets the next word. In a corpus of 315 surnames this letter opens 19 and closes 1. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 2. The surname carrying the most of it is Griffiths, with 2.

Frank · Jennifer

Letters from the same source

All of them descend from a single Phoenician letter, waw.

V

The whole alphabet

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Read a name

Made for