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ß (majuscule: ẞ) is a letter of the German alphabet. In German it is called (, ) or (, ). It represents the phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs. In English, it is called double s, eszett, or sharp s. It is currently used only in German, and can be typographically replaced with the double-s digraph if the character is unavailable. In the 20th century, was replaced with in the spelling of Swiss Standard German (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), while remaining Standard German spelling in other varieties of the German language.

The letter originated as the digraph used in late medieval and early modern German orthography, represented as a ligature of (long s) and (tailed z) in blackletter typefaces, yielding . This developed from an earlier usage of in Old and Middle High German to represent a sibilant that did not sound the same as ; when the difference between the two sounds was lost in the 13th century, the two symbols came to be combined as in some situations.

Traditionally, did not have a capital form, and was capitalized as . Some type designers introduced capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate.

Since 2024 the capital has been preferred over .

Name

The letter-name combines the names of the letters () and () in German.

Usage

Current usage

In standard German, three letters or combinations of letters commonly represent (the voiceless alveolar fricative) depending on its position in a word: , , and . According to current German orthography, represents the sound :

when it is written after a diphthong or long vowel and is not followed by another consonant in the word stem: , , , [Exceptions: and words with final devoicing (e.g., )]; and
when a word stem ending with takes an inflectional ending beginning with a consonant: , .

In verbs with roots where the vowel changes length, this means that some forms may be written with , others with : , , .

Some proper names may use after a short vowel, following older orthography; this is also true of some words derived from proper names (e.g., , , named after Ernst Litfaß).

If no is available in a font, then the official orthography calls for to be replaced with . Since 2024, when writing in capital letters, is preferred, but may be used instead.

In pre-1996 orthography

thumb|Replacement street sign in [[Aachen, adapted to the 1996 spelling reform (old: , new: )]]

According to the orthography in use in German prior to the German orthography reform of 1996, was written to represent :

word internally following a long vowel or diphthong: , ; and
at the end of a syllable or before a consonant, so long as is the end of the word stem: , , . In rare occasions, the difference between and could help differentiate words: (expiration of a pass) and (appropriate).

Switzerland and Liechtenstein

In Swiss Standard German, usually replaces every . This is officially sanctioned by the reformed German orthography rules, which state in §25 E<small>2</small>: "" ("In Switzerland, one may always write 'ss'"). Liechtenstein follows the same practice. There are very few instances where the difference between spelling and affects the meaning of a word, and these can usually be told apart by context.

Other uses

thumb|left|Use of ß (blackletter 'ſz') in [[Sorbian languages|Sorbian: wyßokoſcʒ́i ("highest", now spelled wysokosći). Text of Luke 2:14, in a church in Oßling.]]

thumb|Use of ß in [[Polish language|Polish, in 1599 Jakub Wujek Bible, in the word náßéy, which means our, and would be spelled naszej in modern orthography]]

Occasionally, has been used in unusual ways:

As the Greek lowercase (beta). The original IBM PC CP437 contains a glyph that minimizes their differences placed between (alpha) and (gamma) but named "Sharp s Small". Substitution was also done using other character sets such as ISO/IEC 8859-1 even though they contain no other Greek letters. The lowercase eszett has also been misused as in scientific writing and vice versa.
In Prussian Lithuanian, as in the first book published in Lithuanian, Martynas Mažvydas' Simple Words of Catechism, as well as in Sorbian (see example on the left).
For sadhe in Akkadian glosses, in place of the standard , when that character is unavailable due to limitations of HTML.
The letter appeared in the alphabet made by Jan Kochanowski for the Polish language, that was used from the 16th until the 18th century. It represented the voiceless postalveolar fricative () sound. It was for example used in the Jakub Wujek Bible.
Some authors have used it in German at the beginning of words to transcribe the voiceless s of certain accents.

History

Origin and development

thumb|Use of [[Middle High German letter "z" for modern "ß" in the beginning of the Nibelungenlied: "grozer" = "großer"]]

As a result of the High German consonant shift, Old High German developed a sound generally spelled or that was probably pronounced and was contrasted with a sound, probably pronounced (voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant) or (voiced alveolar retracted sibilant), depending on the place in the word, and spelled . Given that could also represent the affricate , some attempts were made to differentiate the sounds by spelling as or : (), (), (). In Middle High German, simplified to at the end of a word or after a long vowel, but was retained word internally after a short vowel: () vs. () and ().

thumb|Use of the late medieval ligature in [[Ulrich Füetrer's : "uſz" (modern German )]]

In the thirteenth century, the phonetic difference between and was lost at the beginning and end of words in all dialects except for Gottscheerish.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, was frequently spelled or . The earliest appearance of ligature resembling the modern is in a fragment of a manuscript of the poem Wolfdietrich from around 1300.

thumb|An early modern printed rhyme by [[Hans Sachs showing several instances of ß as a clear ligature of : "groß", "stoß", "Laß", "baß" (= modern "besser"), and "Faß"]]

By the late 1400s, the choice of spelling between and was usually based on the sound's position in the word rather than etymology: () tended to be used in word final position: (, ), (, ); () tended to be used when the sound occurred between vowels: (, ). While Martin Luther's early 16th-century printings also contain spellings such as (), early modern printers mostly changed these to : . Around the same time, printers began to systematically distinguish between (the, that [pronoun]) and (that [conjunction]). However, despite its resemblance to the modern , this ligature was not commonly used as an equivalent to the Fraktur in German. This ligature generally fell out of use in the eighteenth century, together with the use of long s in antiqua. A committee of the Typographic Society of Leipzig chose the "Sulzbacher form". In 1903, it was proclaimed as the new standard for the Eszett in Roman type. 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 the use of . However, Hitler intervened to retain , 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 ; their proposals were publicly opposed by German-language writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt and were never implemented. Although the German Orthography Reform of 1996 reduced the use of in standard German, Adrienne Walder writes that an abolition outside Switzerland appears unlikely. The Orthographic Conference of 1903 called for the use of in allcaps until a capital letter could be proposed.

In 1941 the rule was changed:

The was edited separately in East and West Germany during the 1950s to 1980s. The East German of 1957 (15th ed.) introduced a capital in its typesetting without revising the rule for capitalization. The 16th edition of 1969 still announced that an uppercase was in development and would be introduced in the future. The 1984 edition removed this announcement and simply stated that there is no capital version of .

In the 2000s, there were renewed efforts on the part of certain typographers to introduce a capital, . A proposal to include a corresponding character in the Unicode set submitted in 2007 was successful, and the character was included in Unicode version 5.1.0 in April 2008 (). 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. 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; the second possibility is more rare, adopted by DejaVu Sans. Some fonts adopt a third possibility in representing following the Sulzbacher form of , reminiscent of the Greek (beta); such a shape has been adopted by FreeSans and FreeSerif, Liberation Serif and Verdana.

Unicode

There are two code points in Unicode:

(HTML entity defined in 1995)
(introduced in 2008)

In modern browsers, lowercase "ß" will be converted to "SS" when the element containing it is set to uppercase using <code>text-transform: uppercase</code> in Cascading Style Sheets. The JavaScript in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will convert "ß" to "SS" when converted to uppercase (e.g., <code>"ß".toUpperCase()</code>).

The lower-case letter exists in many earlier encodings that covered European languages. In several ISO 8859 and Windows encodings it is at , the value inherited by Unicode. In DOS code pages it is at . Mac OS encodings put it at . Some EBCDIC codes put it at . The upper-case form was rarely, if ever, encoded in single-byte encodings.

SS