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The long, medial or descending s (ſ) is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example ſinfulneſs ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.
History
The medial s is subject to confusion with the minuscule f, sometimes even having an f-like nub at its middle in various kinds of Roman typeface and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left—not possible with the other typeforms mentioned without kerning.
The nub acquired its form in the blackletter style of writing. What looks like one stroke was actually a wedge pointing downward, whose widest part was at that height (x-height), and capped by a second stroke forming an ascender curling to the right. Those styles of writing and their derivatives in type design had a cross-bar at height of the nub for letters f and t, as well as k. In Roman type, these disappeared except for the one on the medial s.
The medial s was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for si, ss, and st, besides the German double s ß.
Long s fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the end of the 19th century; in English the change occurred in the decade before and after 1800. In most countries ligatures vanished as well. Typographers have presently revived ligatures in seriffed and sans-serif text fonts, as well as many kinds of display types. For example, some text fonts have an st ligature made up of a terminal s with a small bulbous curl connecting the two letters at the top, unlike ligatures using a long s, which joins directly to the t by an extension of the long s ascender.
Long s survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German double s ß (ess-zett) is an atrophied ligature form representing either ſz or ſs (see ß for more). Greek also features a normal sigma σ and a special terminal form ς, which may have supported the idea of specialized s forms. In renaissance Europe a significant percentage of the literate class were familiar with Greek.
Modern usage
In linguistics a similar glyph () (called "esh") is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, the first sound in the English word shun.
The medial s is represented in Unicode by the sign U+017F, and may be represented in HTML as ſ or ſ.
Confusion between the medial ſ and f has been the subject of much intentional humour, much of it involving phrases like "sucking pig", and forms the basis of Benny Hill's song "Fad-Eyed Fal" (i.e., Sad-Eyed Sal), as well as "The Lord shall be thy succour" on The Vicar of Dibley. It has also been proposed as a possible etymology of the hacker jargon term cruft (from cruſt).
See also
Notes
External links
History of the English language | Typography | Uncommon Latin letters
"Long s"