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ISO basic Latin alphabet
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S (named ess /ˈɛs/, plural esses) is the 19th letter in the Modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Origin

Phoenician Shin	Etruscan S	Greek Sigma

Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in 'ship'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth (שנא) and represented the phoneme /ʃ/ via the acrophonic principle.

Greek did not have a /ʃ/ phoneme, so the derived Greek letter Sigma (Σ) came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/. In Etruscan and Latin the Greek value of /s/ was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds.

The shape of Latin S arises from Greek Σ by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy in Western Greek alphabets, and the three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet. In other Italic alphabets (Venetic, Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes.

The familiar S-shape with three strokes is present in the earliest Latin inscriptions of the 6th century BC (Duenos Inscription, Praeneste fibula; but with four strokes on the Garigliano Bowl). The familiar rounded S-shape is present regularly in the Old Latin inscriptions of the 2nd century BC (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus).

The Italic letter was also adopted into Elder Futhark, as Sowilō (ᛊ), and appears with four to eight strokes in the earliest runic inscriptions, but is occasionally reduced to three strokes (ᛋ) from the later 5th century, and appears regularly with three strokes in Younger Futhark.

Long s

The minuscule form ſ, called the long s, developed in the early medieval period, within the Visigothic and Carolingian hands, with predecessors in the half-uncial script of Late Antiquity. It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule "round" or "short" s, which was used word-finally.

In most western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century. In Spain, the change was mainly accomplished between the years 1760 and 1766. In France, the change occurred between 1782 and 1793. Printers in the United States stopped using the long s between 1795 and 1810. In English orthography, the London printer John Bell (1745–1831) pioneered the change. His edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he "ventured to depart from the common mode by rejecting the long 'ſ' in favor of the round one, as being less liable to error....." The Times of London made the switch from the long to the short s with its issue of 10 September 1803. Encyclopaedia Britannica's 5th edition, completed in 1817, was the last edition to use the long s.

In German orthography, long s was retained in Fraktur (Schwabacher) type as well as in standard cursive (Sütterlin) well into the 20th century, and was officially abolished in 1941. The ligature of ſs (or ſz) was retained, however, giving rise to the Eszett, ß in contemporary German orthography.

Use in writing systems

The letter ⟨s⟩ represents the voiceless alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant /s/ in most languages as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It also commonly represents the voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant /z/, as in Portuguese mesa (table) or English 'rose' and 'bands', or it may represent the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative , as in most Portuguese dialects when syllable-finally, in Hungarian, in German (before ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩) and some English words as 'sugar', since yod-coalescence became a dominant feature, and , as in English 'measure' (also because of yod-coalescence), European Portuguese Islão (Islam) or, in many sociolects of Brazilian Portuguese, esdrúxulo (proparoxytone) in some Andalusian dialects, it merged with Peninsular Spanish ⟨c⟩ and ⟨z⟩ and is now pronounced .

⟨sh⟩ is a common digraph in English in which it represents in every instance that the letter combination is a true digraph.

The letter ⟨s⟩ is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant (after ⟨t⟩ and ⟨n⟩). It is the most common letter in starting and ending position.

In English and many other languages, primarily Romance ones like Spanish and French, final ⟨s⟩ is the usual mark of plural nouns. It is the regular ending of English third person present tense verbs.

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

• ſ : Latin letter long S, an obsolete variant of S
• ẞ ß : German Eszett or "sharp S", derived from a ligature of long s followed by either s or z
• S with diacritics: Ś ś Ṡ ṡ Ṣ ṣ Ꞩ ꞩ Ŝ ŝ Š š Ş ş Ș ș S̈ s̈
• Ƨ ƨ : Latin letter reversed S (used in Zhuang transliteration)
• IPA-specific symbols related to S: ʃ ɧ ʂ

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

• $ : Dollar sign
• ₷ : Spesmilo
• § : Section sign
• ℠ : Service mark symbol
• ∫ : Integral symbol, short for summation

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤔 : Semitic letter Shin, from which the following symbols originally derive
  • Σ σ : Greek letter Sigma, from which the following letters derive
    • Ⲥ ⲥ : Coptic letter sima
    • С с : Cyrillic letter Es, derived from a form of sigma
    • 𐌔 : Old Italic letter S, from which modern Latin S derives
      • ᛊ, ᛋ, ᛌ : Runic letter sowilo, which is derived from Old Italic S
    • 𐍃 : Gothic letter sigil

Computing codes

Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

		File:Sign language .svg	File:BSL letter .svg
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling)	Braille dots-234 Unified English Braille

See Also

• Cool S

References

1. Spelled 'es'- in compound words
2. "S", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "ess," op. cit.
3. "corresponds etymologically (in part, at least) to original Semitic ṯ (th), which was pronounced s in South Canaanite" Albright, W. F., "The Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Sinai and their Decipherment," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 110 (1948), p. 15. The interpretation as "tooth" is now prevalent, but not entirely certain. The Encyclopaedia Judaica of 1972 reported that the letter represented a "composite bow".
4. Stanley Morison, A Memoir of John Bell, 1745–1831 (1930, Cambridge Univ. Press) page 105; Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use – a study in survivals (2nd. ed, 1951, Harvard Univ. Press) page 293.
5. Order of 3 January 1941 to all public offices, signed by Martin Bormann. Kapr, Albert (1993). Fraktur: Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften. Mainz: H. Schmidt. p. 81. ISBN 3-87439-260-0.
6. English Letter Frequency

External links

• Media related to S at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of S at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of s at Wiktionary
• "S" . The New Student's Reference Work . 1914.

• ISO basic Latin letters