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S



 
 
S is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 is spelled ess or generally es- when part of a compound word, plural esses. S is normally pronounced as /s/ in most languages, although it may also be pronounced as /z/ (as in the Portuguese mesa, the English does, or the German sein) or as /?/ (as in the Portuguese botas in the Carioca
Carioca

Carioca is a Portuguese language adjective or demonym word that refers to the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The original word "Kara'i oca" comes from the indigenous Amerindian language of the Tupi people, meaning "White Man's House"....
 accent or as in the Hungarian kis.

History
Semitic
Semitic languages

File:Amarna Akkadian letter.pngThe Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa....
 Šîn
Shin (letter)

Shin is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language , and Arabic alphabet ....
 ("teeth") represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative
Voiceless postalveolar fricative

The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages....
  (as in ship).






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S is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 is spelled ess or generally es- when part of a compound word, plural esses. S is normally pronounced as /s/ in most languages, although it may also be pronounced as /z/ (as in the Portuguese mesa, the English does, or the German sein) or as /?/ (as in the Portuguese botas in the Carioca
Carioca

Carioca is a Portuguese language adjective or demonym word that refers to the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The original word "Kara'i oca" comes from the indigenous Amerindian language of the Tupi people, meaning "White Man's House"....
 accent or as in the Hungarian kis.

History


Semitic
Semitic languages

File:Amarna Akkadian letter.pngThe Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa....
 Šîn
Shin (letter)

Shin is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language , and Arabic alphabet ....
 ("teeth") represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative
Voiceless postalveolar fricative

The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages....
  (as in ship). Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma (S) came to represent . The name "sigma" probably comes from the Arabic word "samak" (fish; spine) and not "Šîn". In Etruscan
Etruscan language

The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna , in Italy....
 and Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
, the value was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds, such as voiceless postalveolar fricative
Voiceless postalveolar fricative

The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages....
  in Hungarian
Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic languages unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries....
 and German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
 (before p, t) or the voiced alveolar fricative
Voiced alveolar fricative

The voiced alveolar fricatives are consonantal sounds. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents these sounds depends on whether a sibilant or non-sibilant fricative is being described....
  in English, French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
 and German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
.

Care must be taken for incompletely anglicised words from German and proper names from that language. The trigraph "sch" is pronounced like the English digraph "sh." When S is followed either by a p or t, it is pronounced with the same "sh" sound, but when starting a word followed by a vowel, it is pronounced like the English "z," (not the German one).

An alternative form of s, ?, called the long s
Long s

The long, medial or descending s is a form of the Lower case letter 's' formerly used where 's' occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example ?infulne?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 "?infulne?s" 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 minuscule f
F

F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled ef or eff ....
. The ligature of ?s (or ?z) became the German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
 ess-tsett ( ß ).

In a high-school biology
Biology

Biology is a branch of the natural sciences concerned with the study of living organisms and their interaction with each other and their environment ....
 textbook
Textbook

A textbook is a manual of instruction or a standard book in any branch of study. They are produced according to the demand of educational institutions....
 used in the 1960s, a text discussing the discovery of cells
Cell (biology)

The cell is the structural and functional unit of all known Life organisms. It is the smallest unit of an organism that is classified as living, and is often called the building bricks of life....
 in animal tissue by the English biologist Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke, Fellow of the Royal Society was an England natural philosopher and polymath who played an important role in the scientific revolution, through both experimental and theoretical work....
 was photostatically reproduced, including the long "s." The explanation read, "The type is quaint, but once you notice that an s is often much like an f, you fhould have little trouble reading it." The long s has often been parodied in Mad Magazine, including the usage "Poor Alfred'f Almanack."

S is one of the most commonly used letters of the Latin Alphabet in the Basic English language.

Codes for computing


In Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 the capital S is U+0053 and the lower case s is U+0073.

The ASCII
ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
 code for capital S is 83 and for lowercase s is 115; or in binary
Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
 01010011 and 01110011, correspondingly. The EBCDIC
EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
 code for capital S is 226 and for lowercase s is 162.

The numeric character reference
Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML
HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
 and XML are "S" and "s" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

  • ?, ? - Es (Cyrillic)
    Es (Cyrillic)

    eading=Cyrillic letter Es|Image=...
  • ?, ? - Tse (Cyrillic)
    Tse (Cyrillic)

    eading=Cyrillic letter Tse|Image=...
  • S, s - Sigma (Greek)
    Sigma

    Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the /s/ sound. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 200. When used at the end of a word, and the word is not all upper case, the final form is used....
— reversed S (used in Zhuang
Zhuang language

The Zhuang language is used by the Zhuang people in the People's Republic of China. Most speakers live in the Guangxi. Zhuang, which belongs to the Tai language, is an official language in that region....
 transliteration)
  • ? — long s
    Long s

    The long, medial or descending s is a form of the Lower case letter 's' formerly used where 's' occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example ?infulne?s ....
  • $ — the dollar sign
    Dollar sign

    The dollar sign or peso sign is a symbol primarily used to indicate a unit of currency....
  • ?, ? — the integral
    Integral

    Integration is an important concept in mathematics, specifically in the field of calculus and, more broadly, mathematical analysis. Given a function ƒ of a Real number variable x and an interval [ab] of the real line, the integral...
     sign
  • ß — the German
    German language

    German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
     Eszett or "sharp s"
Esh
Esh (letter)

Esh is a character used in conjunction with the Latin alphabet, introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative , and is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet as well as in the alphabets of some African languages....
 (used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless postalveolar fricative
Voiceless postalveolar fricative

The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages....
)
  • ?, ? — Cyrillic
    Cyrillic alphabet

    The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
     letter Dze
    Dze

    eading=Cyrillic letter Dze|Image=...
  • -dd — Is treated with an "S" sound in Gaelic, especially at the end of words
  • § the Section Sign