Esh (letter)

This article is about the letter ʃ ("esh"). For the IPA symbol, see voiceless postalveolar fricative.

Esh (majuscule: Ʃ Unicode U+01A9, minuscule: ʃ Unicode U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script. Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ  or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English sh). It is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the alphabets of some African languages.

Esh is also the name of the letter 𐌎 of the Old Italic alphabet.

The symbol can be inserted using unofficial "English (International)" layout: uppercase Ʃ can be inserted with AltGr+Shift/Caps Lock+F+S while lowercase ʃ is AltGr+F+S.

See also

• Long s (the character ſ)
• Sigma (the Greek letter Σ)
• Sz (digraph)
• Sh (digraph)
• Sch (trigraph)
• Sci (trigraph)
• Sc (digraph)
• Ch (digraph)
• Š
• Ş
• Sha (the Cyrillic letter)
• ഽ (Praslesham)