The long s disappeared from new typefaces rapidly in the mid-1790s, and most printers who could afford to do so had discarded older typefaces by the early years of the 19th century.
It was to distinguish between a hard 's' and a soft 's'. The 'f' represented the soft 's' which is why you will find it spelt 'houfe' and 'houses' in old English texts.
"Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the middle of the 19th century; in French the change occurred from about 1780 onwards, in English in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820.
It's actually a letter called the medial S, also known as the long S, which was a second form of the lowercase letter S. This old-fashioned letter has a long history. It's derived from the Roman cursive S, and it survived as the Old English S, then onward through the history of English orthography until the 1800s.
It originated as the Phoenician symbol for a voiceless sibilant. The Greeks adopted it as the letter sigma (Σ), with lower-case variants according to its position in a word: medial (σ) and final (ζ). The Etruscans and then the Romans further adapted the form to create S.
The origins of the long s, ſ, can be traced all the way back to old Roman cursive, a script used in Rome for everyday, informal writing from the first century AD to about the third century.
In 750 BC, the Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet and the combination was regarded as the initial true alphabet. This was seized by the Latins (Romans) and combined with some Etruscan characters such as the letter S and F.
Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed Z from the alphabet. His justification was that Z had become archaic: the pronunciation of /z/ had become /r/ by a process called rhotacism, rendering the letter Z useless. At the same time, S was also removed, and G was added … but that's another story.
One lower-case letter we no longer use, called the "long s," developed in the 8th century. The long s, which looked like ſ or ſ, was pronounced just like the s in "sir." The long s was only lower case, and most commonly used in the beginning and middle of words.
It wasn't until 1524 when Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian known as the father of the letter J, made a clear distinction between the two sounds.
Blackletter is the oldest typeface style that still has significant echoes in modern type. It emerged in Europe in the middle ages (around 1150 AD) and stuck around well into the 17th century – especially in Germany. It is the direct descendent of Carolingian minuscule, which itself came from Uncial script.
But as Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out, one unusual letter is never silent: the letter V. While it makes an appearance in words like quiver and vivid, you can rest assured it always behaves the exact same way.
The italic ƒ has been used to denote mathematical functions, 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).
z or s? In British English, s is generally used in such words as recognise, authorise. The letter z is used in American English in such words as recognize or authorize. However, it is not wrong to use z in such words when using British English as standard.
F, f [Called 'eff']. The 6th LETTER of the Roman ALPHABET as used for English. It originated in the Phoenician symbol waw, a vertical line forking at the top like Y, which was adapted by the Greeks into two letters: ϝ (digamma: 'double gamma'), which represented the sound /w/, and Υ(upsilon), which represented /u/.
For example, F is a consonant letter, but begins with the sound /e/, which is a vowel sound, so it's correct to say "an F".
Yogh (ʒ) was a letter of the alphabet in Middle English. According to the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, yogh was used to "represent the sound (y) and the voiced and voiceless velar fricatives."
1. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters) Pneumoconiosis caused by inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust.
In German orthography, the letter ß (lowercase), called Eszett (IPA: [ɛsˈtsɛt]) and scharfes S (IPA: [ˌʃaʁfəs ˈʔɛs], "sharp S"), represents the /s/ phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs.
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, ...
Zed is widely known to be used in British English. But it's also used in almost every English-speaking country. In England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, India, Canada (usually), and New Zealand, Z is pronounced as zed. It's derived from the Greek letter zeta.
The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who added letter G to the teaching of the Roman alphabet during the 3rd century BC: he was the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, around 230 BCE.
Phi (/faɪ/; uppercase Φ, lowercase φ or ϕ; Ancient Greek: ϕεῖ pheî [pʰéî̯]; Modern Greek: φι fi [fi]) is the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet.
Q: Why is the letter “w” called “double u”? It looks like a “double v” to me. A: The name of the 23rd letter of the English alphabet is “double u” because it was originally written that way in Anglo-Saxon times. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains it, the ancient Roman alphabet did not have a letter “w.”