An italicized long s used in the word Congress in the United States Bill of Rights.

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. Cropped image of the United States BIll of Rights showing a long s. ... Cropped image of the United States BIll of Rights showing a long s. ... Image of the United States Bill of Rights from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration The United States Bill of Rights consists of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Letter case. ... Look up S, s in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A letterform, letter-form or letter form, is a term used especially in typography, paleography, calligraphy and epigraphy to mean a letters shape. ...

History

Title page of John Milton's Paradise Lost

The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated check mark. Eventually it got a more vertical form.^[1] Image File history File links Milton_paradise. ... Image File history File links Milton_paradise. ... The title page of a book, thesis or other written work is the page at or near the front which displays its title, and author, as well as other information. ... For other persons named John Milton, see John Milton (disambiguation). ... Title page of the first edition (1667) Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. ... A tick (known as a checkmark or check in American English) is a mark (✓) used to indicate the concept yes, for example yes, this has been verified or yes, I agree. Its opposite is the cross (✗), although the cross can also be positive, for example in elections. ...

The long 's' is subject to confusion with the minuscule 'f', sometimes even having an 'f'-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only, 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. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Letter case. ... Look up F, f in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Roman type has two separate meanings in typography, both of which refer to the fact that the capital letters of a Roman font have an appearance similar to those used for lettering stone in ancient Rome: Roman type can refer to one of the major families of traditional typefaces as... For the origin and evolution of fonts, see History of western typography. ... Blackletter in a Latin Bible of AD 1407, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. ... Italic can refer to: Italic languages Italic scripts Italic means Of or from Italy; the usage is most commonly restricted to talking about the people and languages of what is now Italy from the historic period before the Roman Empire. ... The descenders are the parts of the characters that lie below the baseline, highlighted in red. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

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'. Blackletter in a Latin Bible of AD 1407, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. ... In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the height of the lowercase letter x in any font, which is usually the same for a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, and z. ... The ascenders are the parts of the characters that lie above the midline, highlighted in red. ...

The long 's' was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for 'si', 'ss', and 'st', besides the German 'double s' 'ß'. In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. ... The glyph ß is a ligature of Å¿ (long s) and s or z that has become a distinct letter in the German alphabet; its German name is Eszett (IPA: ) or scharfes S (sharp S). ...

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 decades 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. Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... In typography, serifs are non-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. ... In typography, serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. ...

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 fraction of the literate class were familiar with Greek. Blackletter in a Latin Bible of AD 1407, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. ... The glyph ß is a ligature of Å¿ (long s) and s or z that has become a distinct letter in the German alphabet; its German name is Eszett (IPA: ) or scharfes S (sharp S). ... In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. ... The glyph ß is a ligature of Å¿ (long s) and s or z that has become a distinct letter in the German alphabet; its German name is Eszett (IPA: ) or scharfes S (sharp S). ... Sigma (upper case Σ, lower case σ, alternative ς) is the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet. ...

Modern usage

Long s in Berlin 2002

The long 's' survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz based the character on the Latin word summa (sum), which he wrote ſumma. This use first appeared publicly in his paper De Geometria, published in Acta Eruditorum of June, 1686,^[2] but he had been using it in private manuscripts since at least 1675.^[3] ImageMetadata File history File links Download high resolution version (1694x1407, 1181 KB) Summary Sign with long s in Berlin-Neukölln picture made by me around 2000 Licensing File links The following pages link to this file: Long s ... ImageMetadata File history File links Download high resolution version (1694x1407, 1181 KB) Summary Sign with long s in Berlin-Neukölln picture made by me around 2000 Licensing File links The following pages link to this file: Long s ... Berlin is the capital city and one of the sixteen states of the Federal Republic of Germany. ... In calculus, the integral of a function is an extension of the concept of a sum. ... Calculus [from Latin, literally pebble (used in reckoning)] is a major area in mathematics, with applications in science, engineering, business, and medicine. ... Gottfried Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (July 1, 1646 in Leipzig - November 14, 1716 in Hannover) was a German philosopher, scientist, mathematician, diplomat, librarian, and lawyer of Sorb descent. ... Acta Eruditorum (Latin: reports, acts of the scholars) was the first scientific journal of the German lands, published from 1682 to 1782. ... 1686 (MDCLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Friday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar). ... Events January 5 - The Battle of Turckeim June 18 - Battle of Fehrbellin August 10 - King Charles II of England places the foundation stone of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London - construction begins November 11 - Guru Gobind Singh becomes the Tenth Guru of the Sikhs. ...

In linguistics a similar glyph (ʃ) (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 esh is a letter: (upper-case), (lower-case). ... Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ...

The long 's' is represented in Unicode by the sign U+017F, and may be represented in HTML as ſ or ſ. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ...

Confusion between the long 'ſ' and 'f' has been the subject of much intentional humour, much of it involving phrases like "sucking pig", but Greenfleaves made an appearance in a Flanders and Swan monologue about coming up with a Shakespearean hit^[4] and the same joke forms the basis of Benny Hill's song "Fad-Eyed Fal" (i.e., Sad-Eyed Sal), as well as some dialogue in a scene from Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Vol.1 about the Declaration of Independence: Upon perusing Jefferson's new document Franklin reads "life, liberty and the 'purfoot of happinefs'" and tells Jefferson his s's look like f's. It has also been proposed as a possible etymology of the hacker jargon term cruft (from cruſt). My Lady Greensleeves as depicted in an 1864 painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. ... Flanders and Swann were British actor and singer Michael Flanders and composer and linguist Donald Swann who joined forces to write and perform comic songs in the two-man revues At The Drop Of A Hat and At The Drop Of Another Hat. ... Alfred Hawthorn Hill (21 January 1924 – 20 April 1992), better known as Pulle Hill, was a prolific English comic, actor and singer, best known for his television programme, The Benny Hill Show. ... A copy of the 1823 William J. Stone reproduction of the Declaration of Independence The Declaration of Independence was an act of the Second Continental Congress, adopted on July 4, 1776, which declared that the United Colonies) were independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ... In hacker jargon, cruft is redundant, old, or improperly written code which needs to be fixed, but tends to stick around. ... Look up Crust in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten ("The evening mail"), the logo of which is written using the long 'ſ' ( ), is often humorously referred to as "Aftenpoften". Similarly for the Adresseavisen ( ), mocked as "Udresfeabifen". Aftenposten is Norways second largest newspaper with a circulation of 256,600 copies for the morning edition, 155,400 copies for the separate evening edition and 232,900 copies for the Sunday edition in 2003. ... Image File history File links Aftenposten_logo. ... Adresseavisen is a regional newspaper published in Trondheim, Norway daily, except Sundays. ... Image File history File links Adresseavisen-logo. ...

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Langes s

• ß (Eszett)
• Congrefs

Image File history File links Commons-logo. ... The glyph ß is a ligature of ſ (long s) and s or z that has become a distinct letter in the German alphabet; its German name is Eszett (IPA: ) or scharfes S (sharp S). ... An italicized long s used in the word Congress in the United States Bill of Rights. ...

Notes

1. ^ DAVIES, Lyn. A Is for Ox, London: 2006. Folio Society.
2. ^ Mathematics and its History, John Stillwell, Springer 1989, p. 110
3. ^ Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz, J. M. Child, Open Court Publishing Co., 1920, pp. 73–74, 80.
4. ^ http://www.beachmedia.com/gorbuduc.html

External links

• The Straight Dope on long s
• The American Declaration of Independence with long s's
• The Rules for Long S
• The Long and the Short of the Letter S

ISO 646 is an ISO standard that specifies a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived, the best known of which is ASCII. Since the portion of ISO 646 shared by all countries specified only the letters used in the English alphabet, other countries using the... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Look up B, b in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Due to technical limitations, C# redirects here. ... Look up D, d in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up E, e in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up F, f in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The letter G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. ... Look up H, h in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up I, i in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... J# redirects here for technical reasons; see J Sharp. ... Look up K, k in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up L, l in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up M, m in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up N, n in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up O, o in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Slang In the UK, p is also slang for to urinate. Look up P, p in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up Q, q in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up R, r in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up S, s in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The letter T is the twentieth letter in the Latin alphabet. ... U is the twenty-first letter of the modern Latin alphabet. ... Look up V, v in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up W, w in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For other uses, see X (disambiguation). ... Look up Y, y in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up Z, z in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet. ... Palaeography (British) or paleography (American) (from the Greek palaiós, old and graphein, to write) is the study of ancient and medieval manuscripts, independent of the language (Koine Greek, Classical Latin, Medieval Latin, Old English, etc. ... Variants of the Latin alphabet are used by the writing systems of many languages throughout the world. ... A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent mark, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... Roman numerals are a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, adapted from Etruscan numerals. ... Unicode as of version 5. ... List of Latin letters. ...