Why do some older texts use an f instead of an s?

Question

Why do some old texts use f instead of s, and why do they only use f some of the time?

I think it lookf very odd to write things with an f thrown in, feemingly at random, efpecially in such important documents as the Conftitution. It makes it sound af though the Founding Fathers had a lifp.

Answer 1

It only looks like the letter "f". It really is an "s". It's just the way how letters were written back then.

Answer 2

because that was the way things were written.. that's not an f. that is the old way of writing an s

Answer 3

That's not an f. It's a tall, skinny s. It's hard to imagine now, but florid penmanship was once a skill. Now we just click on the font we want, but your ancestors actually wrote with a pen!

Answer 4

It's called the "long s" or "medial s".

"An alternative form of s, ſ, called the long s or medial s, was used at the beginning or in the middle of the word; the modern form, the short or terminal s, was used at the end of the word. For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "ſinfulneſs" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with the minuscule f."

"s" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S

"The long, medial or descending s (ſ) is a form of the minuscule letter 's' formerly used where 's' occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example ſinfulneſs ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s."

"The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated check mark. Eventually it got a more vertical form."

"Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the end of the 19th century; in English the change occurred in the decades before and after 1800. In most countries, ligatures vanished as well."

"The long 's' survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."

"In linguistics a similar glyph (ʃ) (called "esh") is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, the first sound in the English word shun."

"long s" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

"The use of two types of s dates back at least to the Middle Ages. The long s became especially popular during the Italian Renaissance, with the development of the various "humanistic" scripts that gave rise to our present English script. You'll notice that the long f, though not the long s, persists in many serif fonts in the type style we now call italic, although the long s was used in so-called roman (i.e., non-slanty) fonts as well."

"The Italians often used the long s even when they should have used a short one because letters with long expressive strokes in them made for an artier-looking manuscript. Unfortunately, they also made for a manuscript that was near impossible to read, and it's probably for that reason as much as any that the use of the long s finally died out in the 19th century. The form survived in the formal German script Fraktur until Fraktur itself bit the dust after World War II."

"Why did 18th-century writers use F inftead of S?", The Straight Dope : http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_110.html