S

For other uses of "S", see S (disambiguation).
Due to technical restrictions, ſ (long s), S# (Script.NET), and S#arp (S♯arp) redirect here.
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 ( /ˈɛs/; named ess; es- when part of compound word, plural esses)[1] is the nineteenth (19th) letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Contents

History

Phoenician
shin		 Etruscan S Greek
Sigma

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 repr the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ in most languages and IPA; it also commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative /z/, as in the Portuguese mesa or the English does. It may also represent the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative [ ʃ ], as in Portuguese, Hungarian, and German (before p, t). The letter S is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant (after t and n).

In English, final ⟨s⟩ is the usual mark of plural nouns, and of third person present tense verbs.

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

character S s
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S LATIN SMALL LETTER S
character encoding decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 83 0053 115 0073
UTF-8 83 53 115 73
Numeric character reference S S s s
EBCDIC family 226 E2 162 A2
ASCII ASCII 1 83 53 115 73

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

Other representations

NATO phonetic Morse code
Sierra ···
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

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.

External links

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
Śś Ṥṥ Ŝŝ Šš Ṧṧ Ṡṡẛ Şş Ṣṣ Ṩṩ Șș S̩s̩ ᵴ ᶊ ʂ ȿ
Related