S in Different Fonts

From a Phoenician tooth to a curve

The Phoenician shin is usually read as “tooth,” and its sign looked like a row of points, a W on its side. Greek turned it upright into sigma, Σ, and Western Greek writers rounded the angles. Latin took the rounded version, giving the S we use now. Greek kept the zigzag, and still has two lowercase sigmas: σ in the middle of a word and ς at the end.

English once had two lowercase forms too. The long ſ was standard at the start and in the middle of words, and the round s at the end, until printers abandoned the long form around 1800.

The S styles at a glance

Gothic S without the long s

Real blackletter text uses ſ inside words and round s at the end, so “Ostern” would be set with ſ in the middle. The math Fraktur alphabet only encodes the round 𝔰. If you want text that looks authentically old, you can mix in a plain ſ by hand, but it won’t match the Fraktur weight. For most bios the round 𝔰 from our Old English text generator is the practical choice.

The small caps exception

Most small capitals came into Unicode for phonetic transcription, so they sit in IPA Extensions and Phonetic Extensions. S and F were missing from those sets, and their small caps ꜱ and ꜰ were only added to Latin Extended-D in 2008. Coverage is now good on recent devices, but if a small caps name shows one empty box, it is usually the S.

Flipped, mirrored and lookalike S

S looks the same upside down. Mirrored, it becomes ƨ or Ƨ, letters from an old Zhuang tone orthography. The Cyrillic Ѕ (U+0405, DZE) is a pixel-perfect copy of the Latin capital, which makes it a favourite for spoofed account names. The currency style uses ₴, the Ukrainian hryvnia sign, and the Asian style uses 丂, a rare Chinese character.

How much S is in English

S makes up about 6.3% of English letters, and it is the letter of plurals and possessives, so it often lands at the end of a word. In most English dictionaries more headwords begin with S than with any other letter, which makes it one of the most common initials for names and brands.

Choosing an S for a monogram

S curves through both halves of its height, so it looks balanced in the centre of a monogram. Bold script 𝓢 and Fraktur 𝔖 have the most character; the bubble Ⓢ and black square 🆂 work as single-letter avatars. If you are learning to write it by hand, the cursive S lesson explains why the capital starts from the baseline, a common surprise. For a matching style across a whole word, try the cursive text generator.