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ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
v t e

S (named ess /ˈɛs/,Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). In the field of more ephemeral publications, Bell began a London newspaper called The World, of which it has been said that a "vital change ... first made in The World, entitled No. 1 of that paper (for Monday, January 1, 1787) to be chronicled in any kalendar of typographical progress: the abolition of the long 'ſ'...." Bell may have popularized it, but he did not invent it; in his letter of March 26, 1786 to Francis Childs, Benjamin Franklin wrote "the Round s .... begins to be the Mode, and in nice printing the Long 'ſ' is rejected entirely."

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' or English 'rose' and 'bands', or 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' or, in many sociolects of Brazilian Portuguese, 'esdrúxulo', while in some Andalusian dialects, it is merged with Peninsular Spanish ⟨c⟩ and ⟨z⟩ and pronounced .

⟨sh⟩ is a common digraph in English, where it represents in every instance where 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 also usually indicates English third person present tense verbs.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

• 𐤔 : Semitic letter Shin, from which the following symbols originally derive
• Σ σ : Greek letter Sigma, from which S derives
• С с : Cyrillic letter Es, derived from a form of Sigma
• ſ : Latin letter long S, an obsolete variant of S
• Ƨ ƨ : Latin letter reversed S (used in Zhuang transliteration)
• IPA-specific symbols related to S: ʃ ɧ ʂ
• S with diacritics: Ś ś Ṡ ṡ Ṣ ṣ Ꞩ ꞩ Ŝ ŝ Š š Ş ş Ș ș S̈ s̈

Ligatures and abbreviations

• ẞ ß : German Eszett or "sharp S"
• $ : Dollar sign
• ₷ : Spesmilo
• § : Section sign
• ℠ : Service mark symbol
• ∫ : Integral symbol, short for summation

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

尸

References

1. Stanley Morison, A Memoir of John Bell, 1745–1831 (1930, Cambridge Univ. Press) page 118.
2. 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