S

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Look up S or s in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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 is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ɛs/) is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.^[1]

History

Proto-Semitic š	Phoenician S	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.

An alternative form of the minuscule 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 lower case f. The ligature of ſs (or ſz) became the German ess-tsett, ß.

Usage

S represents the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in most languages; it also commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative /z/, as in the Portuguese mesa, the English does, or the German sein. It may also represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], as in Hungarian and German (before p, t).

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of S

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Sierra	···

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

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

С, с - Es (Cyrillic) Ц, ц - Tse (Cyrillic) Σ, σ - Sigma (Greek) Ƨ, ƨ — reversed S (used in Zhuang transliteration) ſ — long s $ — the dollar sign ∫, ∫ — the integral sign

ß — the German Eszett or "sharp s" ʃ — Esh (used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless postalveolar fricative) Ѕ, ѕ — Cyrillic letter Dze -dd — Is treated with an "S" sound in Gaelic, especially at the end of words § the Section Sign

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References

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