LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S

About this character

The Latin small letter sharp s, or eszett, is a distinctive German character representing the voiceless sibilant /s/ after long vowels or diphthongs. Historically, it originated as a ligature of long s and round s (or z) in medieval German blackletter script. It remains essential in German orthography, where it distinguishes words like "Maße" (measures) from "Masse" (mass), though Switzerland largely abandoned it in 1934. In typography, proper eszett usage is a mark of correctness, and the capital ẞ was officially adopted in 2017. In computing, ß is encoded in Unicode and ISO 8859-1, and it poses interesting challenges for locale-sensitive sorting, often collating as "ss.

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