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.

ISO 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 (named ess /ˈɛs/, spelled es- in compound words; plural esses) is the nineteenth (19th) letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

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 in the same manner that the forms 'G' and 'A' are 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 in print and eventually spread to manuscript letters as well. For example, "sinfulness" would be rendered as "ſinfulneſſ" in all medieval hands, and later it was "ſinfulneſs" in some blackletter hands and in print. The modern usage "sinfulness" did not 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 sibilant /s/ in most languages and the IPA. It also commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative /z/, as in Portuguese mesa or English rose and bands, or may represent the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative [ʃ], 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 [ʒ], 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 [θ].

The letter S is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant (after t and n). In English and many other languages, primarily European ones, final ⟨s⟩ is the usual mark of plural nouns. It also usually indicates English third person present tense verbs.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Σ σ : Greek letter Sigma
• С с : Cyrillic letter Es
• Ц ц : Cyrillic letter Tse
• ẞ ß : German Eszett or "sharp S"
• ſ : Latin letter Long S
• ʃ : IPA letter Esh (used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless postalveolar fricative)
• ∫ : integral symbol
• Ѕ ѕ : Cyrillic letter Dze
• SH Sh sh : Latin digraph Sh
• Ƨ ƨ : Latin letter Reversed S (used in Zhuang transliteration)
• $ : dollar sign
• § : Section sign

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

External links

• Media related to S at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for S
• The Wiktionary entry for s

The ISO 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
Letter S with diacritics
Śś	Ṥṥ	Ŝŝ	Šš	Ṧṧ	Ṡṡẛ	Şş	Ṣṣ	Ṩṩ	Șș	S̩s̩	ᵴ	ᶊ	ʂ	ȿ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646