ß
The letter ß is used in German orthography. In German it is called Eszett or scharfes S, it represents the phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs. The letter-name combines the names of the letters of and in German. The character's Unicode names in English are double s, sharp s and eszett. The Eszett letter is currently used only in German, and can be typographically replaced with the double-s digraph if the ß-character is unavailable. In the 20th century, the ß-character was replaced with ss in the spelling of Swiss Standard German, 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 and 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.
Usage
Current usage
In standard German, three letters or combinations of letters commonly represent 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: Straße, Maß, groß, heißen ; and
- when a word stem ending with takes an inflectional ending beginning with a consonant: heißt, größte.
The use of distinguishes minimal pairs such as reißen and reisen on the one hand, and Buße and Busse on the other.
Some proper names may use after a short vowel, following older orthography; this is also true of some words derived from proper names.
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. Previously, was the preferred form.
In pre-1996 orthography
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: Straße, reißen; and
- at the end of a syllable or before a consonant, so long as is the end of the word stem: muß, faßt, wäßrig.
As in the new orthography, it was possible to write for if the character was not available. When using all capital letters, the pre-1996 rules called for rendering as except when there was ambiguity, in which case it should be rendered as. The common example for such a case is IN MASZEN vs. IN MASSEN ; in this example the spelling difference between vs. produces completely different meanings.
Switzerland and Liechtenstein
In Swiss Standard German, usually replaces every. This is officially sanctioned by the reformed German orthography rules, which state in §25 E2: "In der Schweiz kann man immer „ss“ schreiben". 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
Occasionally, has been used in unusual ways:- As the Greek lowercase . The original IBM PC CP437 contains a glyph that minimizes their differences placed between and 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.
- 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
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 or , 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 : wazssar, fuozssi, heizsit. 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: wazzer vs. lâzen and fuoz.In the thirteenth century, the phonetic difference between and was lost at the beginning and end of words in all dialects except for Gottscheerish. Word-internally, Old and Middle High German came to be pronounced , while Old and Middle High German continued to be pronounced. This produces the contrast between modern standard German reisen and reißen. The former is pronounced and comes from, while the latter is pronounced and comes from.
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. In the Gothic book hands and bastarda scripts of the late medieval period, is written with long s and the Blackletter "tailed z", as. A recognizable ligature representing the digraph develops in handwriting in the early 14th century.
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: uſz, -nüſz ; tended to be used when the sound occurred between vowels: groſſes. While Martin Luther's early 16th-century printings also contain spellings such as heyße, early modern printers mostly changed these to : heiſſe. Around the same time, printers began to systematically distinguish between das and daß.
In modern German, the Old and Middle High German is now represented by either,, or, if there are no related forms in which occurs intervocalically, with : messen, Straße, and was.
Standardization of use
The pre-1996 German use of was codified by the eighteenth-century grammarians Johann Christoph Gottsched and Johann Christoph Adelung and made official for all German-speaking countries by the German Orthographic Conference of 1901. In this orthography, the use of was modeled after the use of long and "round"-s in Fraktur. appeared both word internally after long vowels and also in those positions where Fraktur required the second s to be a "round" or "final" s, namely the ends of syllables or the ends of words. In his Deutsches Wörterbuch Jacob Grimm called for or to be written for all instances of Middle and Old High German etymological ; however, his etymological proposal could not overcome established usage.In Austria-Hungary prior to 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 was only used after long vowels.
Use in Roman type
In early modern Latin type, a ligature similar to modern developed out of a long s followed by a round s, and as such was used in languages such as Italian in alternation with, usually based on requirements of space on the page. 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. 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.Jacob Grimm began using in his Deutsche Grammatik ; however, it varied with word internally. Grimm eventually rejected the use of the character; in their Deutsches Wörterbuch, the Brothers Grimm favored writing it as. The First Orthographic Conference in Berlin recommended that ß be represented as – however, both suggestions were ultimately rejected. In 1879, a proposal for various letter forms was published in the Journal für Buchdruckerkunst. 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.
Until the abolition of Fraktur in 1941, it was common for family names to be written with in Fraktur and in Roman type. The formal abolition resulted in inconsistencies in how names are written in modern German.
Abolition and attempted abolitions
The Swiss and Liechtensteiners ceased to use in the twentieth century. This has been explained variously by the early adoption of Roman type in Switzerland, the use of typewriters in Switzerland that omitted in favor of French and Italian characters, and peculiarities of Swiss German that cause words spelled with or to be pronounced with gemination. The Education Council of Zürich had decided to stop teaching the letter in 1935, whereas the Neue Zürcher Zeitung continued to write 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 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.