S
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| ISO basic Latin alphabet |
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| AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz |
S is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (/[invalid input: 'icon']ˈɛs/) is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.[1]
History
| Proto-Semitic š | Phoenician shin |
Etruscan S | Greek Sigma |
|---|---|---|---|
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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
hola senior matty u r the gayest person in the whole wide world
Codes for computing
class="template-letter-box | 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
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 Wikimedia Commons has media related to S.
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References
- ^ "S" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "ess," op. cit.