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In its earliest years, the letter that evolved into our F was an Egyptian hieroglyph that literally was a picture of a snake. This was around 3,000 B.C. Through the process of simplification over many years, the F began to lose its snakelike character, and by the time it emerged as an Egyptian hieratic form it wasn’t much more than a vertical stroke capped by a small crossbar. With a slight stretch of the imagination, it could be said to look like a nail.
This may be why the Phoenicians called the letter “waw,” a word meaning nail or hook, when they adapted the symbol for their alphabet. In its job as a waw, the character represented a semi-consonant sound, roughly pronounced as the W in the word “know.” However, at various times the waw also represented the ‘v’ and sometimes even the ‘u’ sound.
When the Greeks assimilated the Phoenician alphabet, they handled the confusing waw with typically Greek logic: they split it into two characters. One represented the semi-consonant W and the other became the forerunner of our V. (The ‘w’ sound became the Greek digamma, or double gamma, and was constructed by placing one gamma on top of another.)
While the character was eventually dropped from the Greek alphabet, it was able to find work in the Etruscan language. Here it did yeoman’s service until the Romans adopted it as a symbol for the softened ‘v’ or double ‘v’ sound. Even today, the German language (an important source for English) uses the V as an F in words like “vater,” which means father and is pronounced “fahter.”
Finally, the F found a permanent home as the very geometric sixth letter of the Roman alphabet.