S

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For "ſ", see Long s. For "S#arp", see Sharp (group). For other uses, see S (disambiguation).

S is the nineteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is pronounced ess /ɛs/.

In most writing systems using the Latin alphabet, as well as the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter s corresponds to a voiceless alveolar sibilant. Two notable exceptions are Vietnamese and Hungarian, where it represents the postalveolar /ʃ/, as in the English words "sugar" and "sure". Other languages, including English, Portuguese and German have words wherein "s" represents the /ʃ/ sound, but this orthography is considered atypical.

[edit] History

Semitic Šîn ("teeth") represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in ship). The original form may have represented a picture of a tooth, or possibly that of female breasts. Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma (Σ) came to represent /s/. The name "sigma" probably comes from the Semitic letter "Sâmek" (fish; spine) and not "Šîn". In Etruscan and Latin, the [s] value was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds, such as voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] in Hungarian and German (before p, t) or the voiced alveolar fricative [z] in English, French and German (in English rise; in French lisez (="read" imperative plural); in German lesen (="to read").

Care must be taken for incompletely anglicized words from German and proper names from that language. The trigraph "sch" is pronounced like the English digraph "sh." When S is followed either by a p or t, it is pronounced with the same "sh" sound, but when starting a word followed by a vowel, it is pronounced like the English "z," (not the German one).

An alternative form of s, ſ, called the long s or medial s, was used at the beginning or in the middle of the word; the modern form, the short or terminal s, was used at the end of the word. For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "ſinfulneſs" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with the minuscule f. The ligature of ſs (or ſz) became the German ess-tsett ( ß ).

In a high-school biology textbook used in the 1960s, a text discussing the discovery of cells in animal tissue by the English biologist Robert Hooke was photostatically reproduced, including the long "s." The explanation read, "The type is quaint, but once you notice that an s is often much like an f, you fhould have little trouble reading it." The long s has often been parodied in Mad Magazine, including the usage "Poor Alfred'f Almanack."

S is one of the most commonly used letters of the Latin Alphabet in Basic English language.

On June 29, 2007, "S" was posted as a news item on CNN.com, much to the amusement of readers of the website Fark.

[edit] Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital S is U+0053 and the lowercase 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 for lowercase s is 162.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "S" and "s" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] Similar letters and symbols

• Ş, ş — S-cedilla
• Š, š — S-caron
• Ș, ș — S with comma below (used in Romanian)
• Ś, ś — S with acute accent (used in Polish)
• Ŝ, ŝ — S with circumflex accent (used in Esperanto)
• ʂ — S with hook (used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless retroflex fricative)
• Ṡ, ṡ — S with dot above (used in old Irish Gaelic)
• Ṣ, ṣ — S with dot below (used in Indic transliteration)
• Ṥ, ṥ — S with acute and dot above
• Ṧ, ṧ — S with caron and dot above
• Ṩ, ṩ — S with dots below and above
• Ƨ, ƨ — reversed S (used in Zhuang transliteration)
• ſ — long s
• ʃ — Esh (used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless postalveolar fricative)
• ∫, ∫ — the integral sign
• $ — the dollar sign
• ß — the German Eszett or "sharp s"
• Ѕ, ѕ — Cyrillic letter Dze
• -dd — Is treated with an "S" sound in gaelic, especally at the end of words
• § the Section Sign
• Superman's 'S' symbol