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I have a book called "A guide to the birds of Trinidad and Tobago" and the author is named as "Richard ffrench" with a small "f". The author's name is spelled the same way by the Library of Congress, with a lower-case letter starting the surname. What is the origin of this strange spelling? I would guess this "ff" is supposed to represent some special letter which is not a normal part of the Roman alphabet.

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  • I suppose the letter is ff.
    – IS4
    Jun 10, 2018 at 10:43
  • Good question—I’ve always wondered this myself, naïvely imagining it might be Welsh-related (though that never explained the lowercase).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Jun 10, 2018 at 16:09
  • can you provide an image?
    – Ooker
    Jun 11, 2018 at 4:14

2 Answers 2

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary's page for F:

In manuscripts a capital F was often written as ff. A misunderstanding of this practice has caused the writing of Ff or ff at the beginning of certain family names, e.g. Ffiennes, Ffoulkes.

(The pilgrimage of the life of man, English by John Lydgate, A. D. 1426 is an example of a manuscript where a lot of words were written this way, such as in "[...] an holsomme Refuge
whan they fflen to the ffor socour [...]".)

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    Interesting, but why? Why not write F as F?
    – Kyll
    Jun 10, 2018 at 14:38
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    @Kyll Hazarding a guess here: a calligrapher’s pen (which scribes usually used) often has a separable nib, which will ‘split’ in the middle if you press hard enough. In a capital F, the stem (the vertical line) will be a thick stroke, and the cross strokes will be thin. If you press hard enough, the stem can then separate and end up looking like two vertical lines, with cross strokes running across them—which would make it look a lot like two lowercase fs next to each other. So it may have started as a stylistic affectation of F and then been reinterpreted as ff, which caught on.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Jun 10, 2018 at 16:20
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Mh, wouldn't it also apply to other letters then?
    – Kyll
    Jun 10, 2018 at 16:34
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    @Kyll Are there any other letters which, if a thick stem is changed into two thin strokes, would look like two separate lowercase letters? A double-stroked capital I (i) could of course look like two lowercase ls (Ls), but there are very few cases where i and ll can in any way be substituted. I can’t really see any other letters even coming close to being mistakable in this way.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Jun 10, 2018 at 16:39
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    There are those who suggest that F → ff was due to the Blackletter F being misread, rather than a splayed nib.
    – Andrew Leach
    Jun 10, 2018 at 17:42
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I realize it’s been 18 months since this has been asked, but here is your answer:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffrench

With attention paid to the paragraph, “In some cases, the name does not start with an initial capital, but with a lower-case f; the double F is derived from the blackletter F.[citation needed] The Irish branch is considered to be one of the "Tribes of Galway", having been there since the 13th century.”

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    [citation needed]. The citation would need to survey and discount other theories. A mere by-the-way mention does not suffice, not for wikipedia, not for me.
    – vectory
    Dec 27, 2019 at 16:22

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