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48-497: The letter originates as the ⟨ sz ⟩ digraph as used in late medieval and early modern German orthography, represented as a ligature of ⟨ſ⟩ ( long s ) and ⟨ʒ⟩ ( tailed z ) in blackletter typefaces, yielding ⟨ſʒ⟩ . This developed from an earlier usage of ⟨z⟩ in Old and Middle High German to represent a separate sibilant sound from ⟨s⟩ ; when

96-637: A voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ , identical to the English "sh". It corresponds to the voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ in Polish. Sz is the thirty-second letter of the Hungarian alphabet . It represents /s/ and is called "esz" /ɛs/ . Thus, names like Liszt are pronounced /list/ list. In Hungarian, even if two characters are put together to make a different sound, they are considered one letter (a true digraph), and even acronyms keep

144-583: A ligature similar to modern ⟨ß⟩ developed out of a long s followed by a round s ( ⟨ſs⟩ ), and as such was used in languages such as Italian in alternation with ⟨ſſ⟩ , usually based on requirements of space on the page. However, despite its resemblance to the modern ⟨ß⟩ , this ligature was not commonly used as an equivalent to the Fraktur ⟨sz⟩ in German. This ligature generally fell out of use in

192-439: A long orthographic debate. Since 2024 the capital ⟨ẞ⟩ (ligature) has been preferred over ⟨SS⟩ (two letters). Lowercase ⟨ß⟩ was encoded by ECMA-94 (1985) at position 223 (hexadecimal DF), inherited by Latin-1 and Unicode ( U+00DF ß LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S ). The HTML entity ß was introduced with HTML 2.0 (1995). The capital ⟨ẞ⟩

240-512: A result of the High German consonant shift , Old High German developed a sound generally spelled ⟨zz⟩ or ⟨z⟩ that was probably pronounced [s] and was contrasted with a sound, probably pronounced [⁠s̠] ( voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant ) or [z̠] ( voiced alveolar retracted sibilant ), depending on the place in the word, and spelled ⟨s⟩ . Given that ⟨z⟩ could also represent

288-541: A short vowel: wazzer ( German : Wasser ) vs. lâzen ( German : lassen ) and fuoz ( German : Fuß ). In the thirteenth century, the phonetic difference between ⟨z⟩ and ⟨s⟩ was lost at the beginning and end of words in all dialects except for Gottscheerish . Word-internally, Old and Middle High German ⟨s⟩ came to be pronounced [z] (the voiced alveolar sibilant ), while Old and Middle High German ⟨z⟩ continued to be pronounced [s] . This produces

336-485: A single phoneme is makeshift, to be abandoned as soon as a suitable type for the capital ß has been developed. The Duden was edited separately in East and West Germany during the 1950s to 1980s. The East German Duden of 1957 (15th ed.) introduced a capital ⟨ß⟩ in its typesetting without revising the rule for capitalization. The 16th edition of 1969 still announced that an uppercase ⟨ß⟩

384-532: Is available in a font, then the official orthography calls for ⟨ß⟩ to be replaced with ⟨ss⟩ . Additionally, as of 2024, when capitalized, in addition to using capital ⟨ẞ⟩ ( STRAẞE ), the spelling ⟨SS⟩ ( STRASSE ) is also possible. The previous rule, codified in the Orthography Reform of 1996, had been always to replace ⟨ß⟩ with ⟨SS⟩ in allcaps. According to

432-434: Is not considered a single letter for collation purposes. sz should not be confused with ś (or s followed by i), termed "soft sh", a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕ/ . ob sz ar ( area, territory ) pła sz cz ( coat, cloak ) Toma sz ( Thomas ) Compare ś : ś wieca ( candle ) i ś ć ( to go ) si erpień ( August ) In Kashubian , sz represents

480-730: Is now the preferred option for depicting the character in capital letters, with ⟨SS⟩ as a second option. The recommendation of the Sulzbacher form (1903) was not followed universally in 20th-century printing. There were four distinct variants of ⟨ß⟩ in use in Antiqua fonts: The first variant (no ligature) has become practically obsolete. Most modern typefaces follow either 2 or 4, with 3 retained in occasional usage, notably in street signs in Bonn and Berlin. The design of modern ⟨ß⟩ tends to follow either

528-507: Is officially sanctioned by the reformed German orthography rules, which state in §25 E 2 : " In der Schweiz kann man immer „ss“ schreiben " ("In Switzerland , one may always write 'ss'"). Liechtenstein follows the same practice. There are very few instances where the difference between spelling ⟨ß⟩ and ⟨ss⟩ affects the meaning of a word, and these can usually be told apart by context. Occasionally, ⟨ß⟩ has been used in unusual ways: As

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576-677: The Typographic Society of Leipzig chose the "Sulzbacher form". In 1903, it was proclaimed as the new standard for the Eszett in Roman type. Until the abolition of Fraktur in 1941, it was common for family names to be written with ⟨ß⟩ in Fraktur and ⟨ss⟩ in Roman type. The formal abolition resulted in inconsistencies in how names are written in modern German (such as between Heuss and Heuß). The Swiss and Liechtensteiners ceased to use ⟨ß⟩ in

624-414: The affricate [ts] , some attempts were made to differentiate the sounds by spelling [s] as ⟨zss⟩ or ⟨zs⟩ : wazssar ( German : Wasser ), fuozssi ( German : Füße ), heizsit ( German : heißt ). In Middle High German , ⟨zz⟩ simplified to ⟨z⟩ at the end of a word or after a long vowel, but was retained word internally after

672-562: The 's' key. The HTML entity (for the lowercase form) is ß . In TeX and LaTeX , \ss produces ß. A German language support package for LaTeX exists in which ß is produced by "s (similar to umlauts , which are produced by "a , "o , and "u with this package). Additionally, there are keyboard layouts that accommodate ẞ , such as " T2 " ( AltGr H ). There are two code points in Unicode : In modern browsers, lowercase "ß" will be converted to "SS" when

720-537: The German Orthographic Conference of 1902, an alternative rule formulated by Johann Christian August Heyse in 1829 had been officially taught in the schools since 1879, although this spelling was not widely used. Heyse's rule matches current usage after the German orthography reform of 1996 in that ⟨ß⟩ was only used after long vowels. In early modern Latin type ( antiqua ),

768-728: The German Orthography Reform of 1996 reduced the use of ⟨ß⟩ in standard German, Adrienne Walder writes that an abolition outside of Switzerland appears unlikely. Because ⟨ß⟩ had been treated as a ligature, rather than as a full letter of the German alphabet, it had no capital form in early modern typesetting. Moreover, allcaps was not normally used in Fraktur printing. There were, however, proposals to introduce capital forms of ⟨ß⟩ for use in allcaps writing (where ⟨ß⟩ would otherwise usually be represented as either ⟨SS⟩ or ⟨SZ⟩ ). A capital

816-512: The Hong Kong official romanization of Cantonese. In Polish orthography , sz represents a voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ . It usually corresponds to š or ш in other Slavic languages. It is usually approximated by English speakers with the "sh" sound (and conversely, Polish speakers typically approximate the English digraph sh with the "sz" sound), although the two sounds are not completely identical. Like other Polish digraphs , it

864-461: The Old and Middle High German ⟨z⟩ is now represented by either ⟨ss⟩ , ⟨ß⟩ , or, if there are no related forms in which [s] occurs intervocalically, with ⟨s⟩ : messen ( Middle High German : mezzen ), Straße ( Middle High German : strâze ), and was ( Middle High German : waz ). The pre-1996 German use of ⟨ß⟩

912-409: The Sulzbacher form, in which ⟨ʒ⟩ (tailed z) is clearly visible, or else be made up of a clear ligature of ⟨ſ⟩ and ⟨s⟩ . Use of typographic variants in street signs: The inclusion of a capital ⟨ẞ⟩ in Unicode in 2008 revived the century-old debate among font designers as to how such a character should be represented. The main difference in

960-461: The contrast between modern standard German reisen and reißen . The former is pronounced IPA: [ˈʁaɪzn̩] and comes from Middle High German : reisen , while the latter is pronounced IPA: [ˈʁaɪsn̩] and comes from Middle High German : reizen . In the late medieval and early modern periods, [s] was frequently spelled ⟨sz⟩ or ⟨ss⟩ . The earliest appearance of ligature resembling

1008-437: The difference between ⟨ß⟩ and ⟨ss⟩ could help differentiate words: Paßende (expiration of a pass) and passende (appropriate). As in the new orthography, it was possible to write ⟨ss⟩ for ⟨ß⟩ if the character was not available. When using all capital letters, the pre-1996 rules called for rendering ⟨ß⟩ as ⟨SS⟩ except when there

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1056-494: The difference between the two sounds was lost in the 13th century, the two symbols came to be combined as ⟨sz⟩ in some situations. Traditionally, ⟨ß⟩ did not have a capital form, although some type designers introduced de facto capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital, ⟨ẞ⟩ , as an acceptable variant in German orthography, ending

1104-437: The eighteenth century, together with the use of long s in antiqua. German works printed in Roman type in the late 18th and early 19th centuries such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte 's Wissenschaftslehre did not provide any equivalent to the ⟨ß⟩ . Jacob Grimm began using ⟨ß⟩ in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819); however, it varied with ⟨ſſ⟩ word internally. Grimm eventually rejected

1152-543: The element containing it is set to uppercase using text-transform: uppercase in Cascading Style Sheets . The JavaScript in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will convert "ß" to "SS" when converted to uppercase (e.g., "ß".toUpperCase() ). The lower-case letter exists in many earlier encodings that covered European languages. In several ISO 8859 and Windows encodings it is at 0xDF ,

1200-451: The late 1400s, the choice of spelling between ⟨sz⟩ and ⟨ss⟩ was usually based on the sound's position in the word rather than etymology: ⟨sz⟩ ( ⟨ſz⟩ ) tended to be used in word final position: uſz ( Middle High German : ûz , German : aus ), -nüſz ( Middle High German : -nüss(e) , German : -nis ); ⟨ss⟩ ( ⟨ſſ⟩ ) tended to be used when

1248-539: The letter in 1935, whereas the Neue Zürcher Zeitung continued to write ⟨ß⟩ until 1971. Swiss newspapers continued to print in Fraktur until the end of the 1940s, and the abandonment of ß by most newspapers corresponded to them switching to Roman typesetting. When the Nazi German government abolished the use of blackletter typesetting in 1941, it was originally planned to also abolish

1296-515: The letter intact. Hungarian usage of s and sz is almost the reverse of the Polish usage. In Hungarian, s represents /ʃ/ (a sound similar to /ʂ/ ). Therefore, the Hungarian capital of Budapest is natively pronounced ( /ˈbudɒpɛʃt/ ), rhyming with standard English fleshed rather than pest . There is also a zs in Hungarian, which is the last (forty-fourth) letter of the alphabet, following z. These examples are Hungarian words that use

1344-537: The modern ⟨ß⟩ is in a fragment of a manuscript of the poem Wolfdietrich from around 1300. In the Gothic book hands and bastarda scripts of the late medieval period, ⟨sz⟩ is written with long s and the Blackletter "tailed z", as ⟨ſʒ⟩ . A recognizable ligature representing the ⟨sz⟩ digraph develops in handwriting in the early 14th century. By

1392-515: The one hand ( [s] vs. [z] ), and Buße ( IPA: [ˈbuːsə] , penance) and Busse ( IPA: [ˈbʊsə] , buses) on the other (long vowel before ⟨ß⟩ , short vowel before ⟨ss⟩ ). Some proper names may use ⟨ß⟩ after a short vowel, following the old orthography; this is also true of some words derived from proper names (e.g., Litfaßsäule; advertising column , named after Ernst Litfaß ). If no ⟨ß⟩

1440-510: The orthography in use in German prior to the German orthography reform of 1996 , ⟨ß⟩ was written to represent [s] : In the old orthography, word stems spelled ⟨ss⟩ internally could thus be written ⟨ß⟩ in certain instances, without this reflecting a change in vowel length: küßt (from küssen ), faßt (from fassen ), verläßlich and Verlaß (from verlassen ), kraß (comparative: krasser ). In rare occasions,

1488-505: The right-hand end on the number row. The German typewriter keyboard layout was defined in DIN 2112, first issued in 1928. In other countries, the letter is not marked on the keyboard, but a combination of other keys can produce it. Often, the letter is input using a modifier and the 's' key. The details of the keyboard layout depend on the input language and operating system: on some keyboards with US-International (or local 'extended') setting,

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1536-548: The second possibility is more rare, adopted by Dejavu Sans . Some fonts adopt a third possibility in representing ⟨ẞ⟩ following the Sulzbacher form of ⟨ß⟩ , reminiscent of the Greek ⟨ β ⟩ (beta); such a shape has been adopted by FreeSans and FreeSerif , Liberation Serif and Verdana . In Germany and Austria, a 'ß' key is present on computer and typewriter keyboards, normally to

1584-471: The second s to be a "round" or "final" s, namely the ends of syllables or the ends of words. In his Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854) Jacob Grimm called for ⟨ß⟩ or ⟨sz⟩ to be written for all instances of Middle and Old High German etymological ⟨z⟩ (e.g., eß instead of es from Middle High German : ez ); however, his etymological proposal could not overcome established usage. In Austria-Hungary prior to

1632-569: The shapes of ⟨ẞ⟩ in contemporary fonts is the depiction with a diagonal straight line vs. a curved line in its upper right part, reminiscent of the ligature of tailed z or of round s , respectively. The code chart published by the Unicode Consortium favours the former possibility, which has been adopted by Unicode capable fonts including Arial , Calibri , Cambria , Courier New , Dejavu Serif , Liberation Sans , Liberation Mono , Linux Libertine and Times New Roman ;

1680-412: The sound [s] : In verbs with roots where the vowel changes length, this means that some forms may be written with ⟨ß⟩ , others with ⟨ss⟩ : wissen , er weiß , er wusste . The use of ⟨ß⟩ distinguishes minimal pairs such as reißen ( IPA: [ˈʁaɪsn̩] , to rip) and reisen ( IPA: [ˈʁaɪzn̩] , to travel) on

1728-518: The sound occurred between vowels: groſſes ( Middle High German : grôzes , German : großes ). While Martin Luther 's early 16th-century printings also contain spellings such as heyße ( German : heiße ), early modern printers mostly changed these to ⟨ſſ⟩ : heiſſe . Around the same time, printers began to systematically distinguish between das (the, that [pronoun]) and daß (that [conjunction]). In modern German,

1776-584: The symbol is created using AltGr s (or Ctrl Alt s ) in Microsoft Windows , Linux and ChromeOS ; in MacOS , one uses ⌥ Option s on the US, US-Extended, and UK keyboards. In Windows, one can use Alt + 0 2 2 3 . On Linux Compose s s works, and Compose S S for uppercase. Some modern virtual keyboards show ß when the user presses and holds

1824-539: The time widely advocated the use of this type, but its use nevertheless remained very limited. The preface to the 1925 edition of the Duden dictionary expressed the desirability of a separate glyph for capital ⟨ß⟩ : Die Verwendung zweier Buchstaben für einen Laut ist nur ein Notbehelf, der aufhören muss, sobald ein geeigneter Druckbuchstabe für das große ß geschaffen ist. The use of two letters for

1872-501: The twentieth century. This has been explained variously by the early adoption of Roman type in Switzerland, the use of typewriters in Switzerland that did not include ⟨ß⟩ in favor of French and Italian characters, and peculiarities of Swiss German that cause words spelled with ⟨ß⟩ or ⟨ss⟩ to be pronounced with gemination . The Education Council of Zürich had decided to stop teaching

1920-511: The use of ⟨ß⟩ . However, Hitler intervened to retain ⟨ß⟩ , while deciding against the creation of a capital form. In 1954, a group of reformers in West Germany similarly proposed, among other changes to German spelling, the abolition of ⟨ß⟩ ; their proposals were publicly opposed by German-language writers Thomas Mann , Hermann Hesse , and Friedrich Dürrenmatt and were never implemented. Although

1968-587: The use of the character; in their Deutsches Wörterbuch (1838), the Brothers Grimm favored writing it as ⟨sz⟩ . The First Orthographic Conference in Berlin (1876) recommended that ß be represented as ⟨ſs⟩ – however, both suggestions were ultimately rejected. In 1879, a proposal for various letter forms was published in the Journal für Buchdruckerkunst . A committee of

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2016-564: The value inherited by Unicode. In DOS code pages it is at 0xE1 . Mac OS encodings put it at 0xA7 . Some EBCDIC codes put it at 0x59 . The upper-case form was rarely, if ever, encoded in single-byte encodings. Sz (digraph) Sz is a digraph of the Latin script , used in Polish , Kashubian and Hungarian , and in the Wade–Giles system of Romanization of Chinese, as well as

2064-564: Was ambiguity, in which case it should be rendered as ⟨SZ⟩ . The common example for such a case is IN MASZEN ( in Maßen "in moderate amounts") vs. IN MASSEN ( in Massen "in massive amounts"); in this example the spelling difference between ⟨ß⟩ vs. ⟨ss⟩ produces completely different meanings. In Swiss Standard German , ⟨ss⟩ usually replaces every ⟨ß⟩ . This

2112-542: Was codified by the eighteenth-century grammarians Johann Christoph Gottsched (1748) and Johann Christoph Adelung (1793) and made official for all German-speaking countries by the German Orthographic Conference of 1901 . In this orthography, the use of ⟨ß⟩ was modeled after the use of long and "round"-s in Fraktur. ⟨ß⟩ appeared both word internally after long vowels and also in those positions where Fraktur required

2160-411: Was encoded by Unicode in 2008 at ( U+1E9E ẞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S ). In standard German , three letters or combinations of letters commonly represent [s] (the voiceless alveolar fricative ) depending on its position in a word: ⟨s⟩ , ⟨ss⟩ , and ⟨ß⟩ . According to current German orthography , ⟨ß⟩ represents

2208-597: Was first seriously proposed in 1879, but did not enter official or widespread use. The Orthographic Conference of 1903 called for the use of ⟨SZ⟩ in allcaps until a capital letter could be proposed. Historical typefaces offering a capitalized eszett mostly date to the time between 1905 and 1930. The first known typefaces to include capital eszett were produced by the Schelter & Giesecke foundry in Leipzig, in 1905/06. Schelter & Giesecke at

2256-444: Was in development and would be introduced in the future. The 1984 edition again removed this announcement and simply stated that there is no capital version of ⟨ß⟩ . In the 2000s, there were renewed efforts on the part of certain typographers to introduce a capital, ⟨ẞ⟩ . A proposal to include a corresponding character in the Unicode set submitted in 2004 was rejected. A second proposal submitted in 2007

2304-505: Was successful, and the character was included in Unicode version 5.1.0 in April 2008 ( U+1E9E ẞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S ). The international standard associated with Unicode (UCS), ISO/IEC 10646 , was updated to reflect the addition on 24 June 2008. The capital letter was finally adopted as an option in standard German orthography in 2017. As of 2024, ⟨ẞ⟩

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