The long s ⟨ſ⟩, also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter ⟨s⟩. It replaced the single s, or one or both of the letters s in a 'double s' sequence (e.g., "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "poſſeſs" or "poſseſs" for "possess"—but never *"poſſeſſ").
Why in old English text was an 's' written as an 'f'? It wasn't; it was just written differently according to its position in the word. The f-like s (like an f without the crossbar) was a tall variant used at the start or in the middle of a word, which the modern s was used at the end or after a tall s.
This may have been due to the fact that: Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the middle of the 19th century; in French the change occurred from about 1780 onwards, in English in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820.
It looked almost like a check mark, with an added diagonal line on top of it. In new Roman cursive, which developed between the third and seventh century AD, s was written almost as we write the lowercase r today: a vertical downstroke, followed by an upstroke with a curve.
"Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the middle of the 19th century; in French the change occurred from about 1780 onwards, in English in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820.
Often, a short S would go next to the letter F (e.g. misfortune) to avoid confusion. Around 1780, the long S suddenly fell out of fashion. It's thought that as technology advanced, printers wanted to simplify their typesets and kept just one form of S in their kits.
The long s disappeared from new typefaces rapidly in the mid-1790s, and most printers who could afford to do so had discarded older typefaces by the early years of the 19th century.
Ƨ (minuscule: ƨ) is a letter which appears in numerous alphabets, including some proposed extensions of the Latin alphabet. Depending on the context in which the letter is used, it is typically based either on the numeral 2 or the Latin letter S.
In German, the letter ß is known as the eszett or scharfes (sharp) S. It's a special character, similar to the German umlaut you're probably used to seeing by now. But unlike those two dots above a, o or u, the eszett is written as a capital B-shaped character with a tail: ß.
It originated as the Phoenician symbol for a voiceless sibilant. The Greeks adopted it as the letter sigma (Σ), with lower-case variants according to its position in a word: medial (σ) and final (ζ). The Etruscans and then the Romans further adapted the form to create S.
The main objective of this change is to simplify the phonetic aspect of the language, and to unify the American and British spellings.
It's actually a letter called the medial S, also known as the long S, which was a second form of the lowercase letter S. This old-fashioned letter has a long history. It's derived from the Roman cursive S, and it survived as the Old English S, then onward through the history of English orthography until the 1800s.
plural noun. nonmetal commodities such as cocoa, sugar, and grains, bought and sold on a futures market. Also called: softs.
There is only one letter in the language that is never silent. Can you guess what it is? The letter is V! There are various very valuable v-words, and that V is never silent!
Etymology 1. Old English lower case letter f, from 7th century replacement by Latin lower case f of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc letter ᚠ (f, “fe”).
The German letter ß is a ligature and is also called a “scharfes s” (sharp s). But it's simpler than it sounds–it actually just means “ss”. The best thing about this letter? It sounds exactly like the “s” sound in English!
The German ligature (additional character): The letter ß, is also known as the "sharp S", "eszett" or "scharfes S", and is the only German letter that is not part of the Latin/Roman alphabet. The letter is pronounced (like the "s" in "see"). The ß is not used in any other language.
(1) Hold down the [Alt] key and on the numeric keypad press the digits "0", "1", "6" and "7" in that order, then release the [Alt] key.
Primary usage
Moreover, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin standard languages adopted the Gaj's Croatian alphabet alongside Cyrillic thereby adopting "š", while the same alphabet is used for Romanization of Macedonian. Certain variants of Belarusian Latin and Bulgarian Latin also use the letter.
Ṣ (minuscule: ṣ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed from an S with the addition of a dot below the letter. Its uses include: In the Alvarez/Hale orthography of the Tohono Oʼodham language to represent retroflex [ʂ] (Akimel O'odham and Saxton/Saxton use <sh> instead)
There's no clear answer for why the long s exists as a typographical feature of the Roman alphabet, though the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets also distinguish between different forms of s, such as σ and ς as the two forms of the Greek letter sigma.
In German orthography, the letter ß, called Eszett (IPA: [ɛsˈtsɛt] ess-TSET) and scharfes S (IPA: [ˌʃaʁfəs ˈʔɛs], "sharp S"), represents the /s/ phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs.
In 750 BC, the Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet and the combination was regarded as the initial true alphabet. This was seized by the Latins (Romans) and combined with some Etruscan characters such as the letter S and F.