S

S
Basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd    
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn
Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt
Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

S (play /ˈɛs/; named ess or es- when part of compound word, plural esses)[1] is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents

History

Proto-Semitic š Phoenician
shin		 Etruscan S Greek
Sigma
Proto-semiticS-01.png PhoenicianS-01.png EtruscanS-01.png Sigma uc lc.svg

Semitic Šîn ("teeth") represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in ship). Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma (Σ) came to represent /s/. In Etruscan and Latin, the /s/ value was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds.

The minuscule form of s was ſ, called the long s, up to the fifteenth century or so, and the form 'S' was used then only as upper case, just like 'G' and 'A' were only upper case. With the introduction of printing, the modern form s began to be used at the end of words by some printers. Later, it was used everywhere and eventually spread to manuscript letters as well. For example, "sinfulness" would be rendered as "ſinfulneſſ" in all medieval hands, later it was "ſinfulneſs" in some blackletter hands and in print. The modern usage "sinfulness" didn't become widespread in print until the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion of 'ſ' with the lower case f in typefaces which had a very short horizontal stroke in their lowercase 'f'. The ligature of ſs (or ſz) became the German ess-tsett, ß.

Usage

The letter S represents the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in most languages; it also commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative /z/, as in the Portuguese mesa or the English does. It is often used at the ends to denote the plural, such as in dogs or pages. It may also represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], as in Portuguese, Hungarian, and German (before p, t).

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of S
NATO phonetic Morse code
Sierra ···
ICS Sierra.svg Semaphore Sierra.svg ⠎
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

In Unicode, the capital S is U+0053 and the lower case s is U+0073.

The ASCII code for capital S is 83 and for lowercase s is 115; or in binary 01010011 and 01110011, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital S is 226 and the code for lowercase s is 162.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "S" and "s" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

  • С, с - Es (Cyrillic)
  • Ц, ц - Tse (Cyrillic)
  • Σ, σ - Sigma (Greek)
  • Ƨ, ƨ — reversed S (used in Zhuang transliteration)
  • ſ — long s
  • $ — the dollar sign
  • ∫, ∫ — the integral symbol
  • ß — the German Eszett or "sharp s"
  • ʃ — Esh (used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless postalveolar fricative)
  • Ѕ, ѕ — Cyrillic letter Dze
  • § the Section Sign

In popular culture

According to Webster's Dictionary, S is the 3rd most common letter, after e and a, in the English language.

References

  1. ↑ "S" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "ess," op. cit.
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter S with diacritics
ŚśṤṥŜŝŠšṦṧṠṡẛŞşṢṣṨṩȘșS̩s̩ᵴᶊʂȿ

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646