ß

Origin

The spelling of sz for the voiceless alveolar fricative ([s]), continuing Proto-Germanic /t/, originates in Old High German, contrasting with the voiceless alveo-palatal fricative ([⁠ɕ⁠]), continuing Proto-Germanic /s/, spelled ss.

The spelling survived into Middle High German even after the merger of the two phonemes [s] and [⁠ɕ⁠]. In the Gothic book hands and bastarda scripts of the high medieval period, ⟨sz⟩ would be written with long s and tailed z, as ſʒ. The development of a recognizable ligature representing the sz digraph develops in handwriting, in the early 14th century. This ligature was also adopted as a separate type in the early blackletter types of the 15th century.

The ß ligature is in origin separate from the development of the ſʒ ligature. It developed in early 16th-century humanist Latin manuscripts representing the ſs digraph. Brekle (2001) cites as the earliest appearance of the ligature the handwriting of Lodovico Vicentino, dated 1515. This ligature was adopted into Antiqua typefaces.

There was thus, in early printing, no direct contrast between an ſʒ and an ſs ligature in any single typeface: blackletter fonts designed for printing German would have an ſʒ but no ſs ligature (German ⟨ss⟩ being rendered as ſſ), while Antiqua fonts intended for printing Latin or Italian would have an ſs but no ſʒ ligature. When German texts began to be printed in Antiqua (see Antiqua–Fraktur dispute), the Antiqua ß ligature came to be used as the equivalent of the sz ligature in blackletter fonts. Thus, the modern (Antiqua) German letter ß is derived from ſs graphically but represents the historical sz digraph continued from Middle High German and Early Modern High German orthography.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, when more and more German texts were printed in Roman type (Antiqua), typesetters looked for a Roman counterpart for the blackletter ſz ligature, which did not exist in Roman fonts. Printers experimented with various techniques, mostly replacing blackletter ß in Roman type with either sz, ss, ſs, or some combination of these. Although there are early examples in Roman type of a ſs-ligature that looks like the letter ß, it was not commonly used for sz.

Sulzbacher Form

It was only with the First Orthographic Conference in Berlin in 1876 that printers and type foundries started to look for a common letter form to represent the Eszett in Roman type. 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 so-called Sulzbacher Form. In 1903 it was proclaimed as the new standard for the Eszett in Roman type.

Since then, German printing set in Roman type has used the letter ß. The Sulzbacher Form, however, did not find unanimous acceptance. It became the default form, but many type designers preferred (and still prefer) other forms. Some resemble a blackletter sz-ligature, others more a Roman ſs-ligature.

The letter ß proper has thus only been used in German typesetting. The use of ligatures similar to ß representing not a letter but the digraph ſs can be found in early modern printing in other languages (Italian and Latin); in English-language typesetting, the spelling ſs occurs mostly as two unligatured letters.

Historical orthography

Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) and Johann Christian August Heyse (1764–1829) were two German lexicographers who tried to establish consistent rules on the application of the letter s.

In Austria Heyse's rule of 1829 prevailed from 1879 until the second orthographic conference of 1901, where it was decided to prefer Adelung's rule over Heyse's. The German orthography reform of 1996 reintroduced Heyse's variant, yet without the long s.

In order to display its elements correctly, the ligatures of the Fraktur typesetting are not shown. Therefore, the modern Antiqua-ß was used for the Latin orthography since the 20th century.

Heyse's argument: Given that "ss" may appear at the end of a word, before a fugue and "s" being a common initial letter for words, "sss" is likely to appear in a large number of cases (the amount of these cases is even higher than all the possible triple consonant cases (e.g. "Dampfschifffahrt") together). Critics point out that a triple "s" in words like "Missstand" feature less readability than spelling it "Mißstand". Even though the second word of a compound does not start with "s", "ß" should be used to improve the readability of the fugue (e.g. "Meßergebnis" over "Messergebnis" (measurement), which suggests the unrelated word "Messer" (knife), and "Meßingenieur" over "Messingenieur" (measuring engineer), which suggests the unrelated word "Messing" (brass)).

This problem of Adelung's rule was solved by Heyse who distinguished between the long s ("ſ") and the round s ("s"). Only the round s could finish a word, therefore also called terminal s (Schluß-s resp. Schluss-s). The round s also indicates the fugue in compounds. Instead of "Missstand" and "Messergebnis" one wrote "Miſsſtand" and "Meſsergebnis". Back then a special ligature for Heyse's rule was introduced: ſs. Amongst the common ligatures of "ff", "ft", "ſſ" and "ſt", "ſs" and "ſʒ" were two different characters in the Fraktur typesetting if applying Heyse's rule.

Graphical variants

The recommendation of the Sulzbacher Form (1903) was not followed unversally in 20th-century printing. There were four distinct variants of ß in use in Antiqua fonts:

1. ſs without ligature, but as a single type, with reduced spacing between the two letters
2. the ligature of ſ and s inherited from the 16th-century Antiqua typefaces
3. a ligature of ſ and tailed z, adapting the blackletter ligature to Antiqua
4. the Sulzbacher form.

The first variant (no ligature) has become practically obsolete. Most modern typefaces follow either 2. or 4., with 3. retained in occasional usage, notably in street signs in Bonn and Berlin.

Use of typographic variants in street signs:

Capital form

Because ß is treated as a ligature, not a full letter of the German alphabet, it has no capital form in early modern typesetting. There have however been proposals to introduce capital forms of ß for use in allcaps writing (where ß would usually be represented as either SS or SZ). This was first proposed in 1879, but did not enter official or widespread usage. The preface to the 1925 edition of the Duden dictionary expressed the desirability of a separate glyph for capital ß:

"Die Verwendung zweier Buchstaben für einen Laut ist nur ein Notbehelf, der aufhören muss, sobald ein geeigneter Druckbuchstabe für das große ß geschaffen ist." "The use of two letters for a single phoneme is makeshift, to be abandoned as soon as a suitable type for the capital ß has been developed."

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

Regardless of prescriptive or orthographical concerns, types for capital ß were designed in various typefaces in the 1920s and 1930s even though they were rarely used. In the 2000s, Andreas Stötzner, editor of the typographical magazine Signa campaigned for the introduction of the character. Stötzner deposited a corresponding proposal with the Unicode Consortium in 2004. The proposal was rejected at the time, but a second proposal submitted in 2007 was successful and the character was introduced in 2008 (Unicode version 5.1.0), as U+1E9E ẞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S (Latin Extended Additional block). In 2016, the Council for German Orthography proposed the introduction of optional use of ẞ in its ruleset (i.e. variants STRASSE vs. STRAẞE would be accepted as equally valid).

Encoding

The HTML entity for ß is ß. Its codepoint in the ISO 8859 character encoding versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16 and identically in Unicode is 223, or DF in hexadecimal. In TeX and LaTeX, ss produces ß. A German language support package for LaTeX exists in which ß is produced by "s (similar to umlauts, which are produced by "a, "o, and "u with this package).

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

Usage in the reformed orthography of 1996

In the orthography of the German spelling reform of 1996, both ß and ss are used to represent /s/ between two vowels as follows:

1. ß is used after diphthongs (beißen [ˈbaɪ̯sn̩] ‘to bite’)
2. ß is used after long vowels (grüßen [ˈɡʁyːsn̩] ‘to greet’)
3. ss is used after short vowels (küssen [ˈkʏsn̩] ‘to kiss’)

Thus it helps to distinguish words like Buße (long vowel) 'penance, fine' and Busse (short vowel) 'buses'. It is also consistent with the general rule of German spelling that a doubled consonant letter serves to mark the preceding vowel as short (the consonant sound is never actually doubled or lengthened in pronunciation).

In words where the stem changes, some forms may have an ß but others an ss, for instance sie beißen (‘they bite’) vs. sie bissen (‘they bit’).

The same rules apply at the end of a word or syllable, but are complicated by the fact that single s is also pronounced /s/ in those positions. Thus, words like groß ('large') require ß, while others, like Gras ('grass') use a single s. The correct spelling is not predictable out of context (in Standard German pronunciation), but is usually made clear by related forms, e.g., Größe ('size') and grasen ('to graze'), where the medial consonants are pronounced [s] and [z] respectively. Many dialects of German however have an even longer vowel, or an audibly less sharp s, in cases single s is used.

Usage in the traditional orthography

In the traditional orthography, ß is always used at the end of a word or word-component, or before a consonant, even when the preceding vowel is short. For example, Fuß ('foot') has a long vowel, pronounced /fuːs/, and so was unaffected by the spelling reform; but Kuß ('kiss') has a short vowel, pronounced /kʊs/, and was reformed to Kuss. Other traditional examples included Eßunlust ('loss of appetite'), and wäßrig ('watery'), but Wasser ('water').

The spelling reform affected some German-language forms of foreign place names, such as Rußland ("Russia"), reformed Russland, and Preßburg ("Bratislava"), reformed Pressburg. The orthography of personal names (first names and family names) and of names for locations within Germany proper, Austria and Switzerland were not affected by the reform of 1996, however; these names often use irregular spellings that are otherwise impermissible under German spelling rules, not only in the matter of the ß but also in many other respects.

The traditional orthography encouraged the use of SZ in place of ß in words with all letters capitalized where a usual SS would produce an ambiguous result. One possible ambiguity was between IN MASZEN (in limited amounts; Maß, "measure") and IN MASSEN (in massive amounts; Masse, "mass"). Such cases were rare enough that this rule was officially abandoned in the reformed orthography. The German military still occasionally uses the capitalized SZ, even without any possible ambiguity, as SCHIESZGERÄT (“shooting materials”). Architectural drawings may also use SZ in capitalizations because capital letters and both Maß and Masse are frequently used. Military teleprinter operation within Germany still uses sz for ß (unlike German typewriters, German teleprinter machines never featured either umlauts or the ß letter).

Substitution and all caps

If no ß is available, ss or sz is used instead (sz especially in Hungarian-influenced eastern Austria). This applies especially to all caps or small caps texts because ß does not have a generally accepted majuscule form. Excepted are all-caps names in legal documents; they may retain an ß to prevent ambiguity (for instance: STRAßER, since Straßer and Strasser are both possible names).

This ss that replaces an ß has to be hyphenated as a single letter in the traditional orthography. For instance STRA-SSE (‘street’); compare Stra-ße. In the reform orthography, it is hyphenated like other double consonants: STRAS-SE.

Switzerland and Liechtenstein

In Swiss Standard German, ss usually replaces every ß. This is officially sanctioned by the reformed German orthography rules, which state in §25 E2: In der Schweiz kann man immer „ss“ schreiben ("In Switzerland, one may always write 'ss'"). Liechtenstein follows the same practice.

In Switzerland, ß has been gradually abolished since the 1930s, when most cantons decided not to teach it any more and the Swiss postal service stopped using it in place names. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was the last Swiss newspaper to give up ß, in 1974. Today, Swiss publishing houses use ß only for books that address the entire German-speaking market.

Keyboards

In Germany and Austria, the letter ß is present on computer and typewriter keyboards, normally to the right on the upper row. The German typewriter keyboard layout was defined in DIN 2112, first issued in 1928.

In other countries, the letter is not marked on the keyboard, but a combination of other keys can produce it. Often, the letter is input using a modifier and the s key. The details of the keyboard layout depend on the input language and operating system, such as Ctrl+Alt+s, on some keyboards such as US-International also AltGr+s in Microsoft Windows or Option+s ont the US, US-Extended, and UK keyboards in macOS.

Some modern virtual keyboards show ß when the user presses and holds the s key.

Alternative uses

ß is sometimes used in German writing to indicate a pronunciation of /s/ where /z/ would otherwise be usual (in standard German, initial ⟨s⟩ before a vowel is pronounced /z/). Gabriela Mendling (pseudonym Luise Endlich) in her two novels (1999, 2000) used an initial ß in her novels to approximate the local dialect in Frankfurt (Oder); thus ßind ßie? ("Sind Sie?").

'ß' was used to represent /ʃ/ ⟨ in a German-influenced spelling system for the Lithuanian language which was used in Lithuania Minor in East Prussia, which can be seen in e.g. some surnames.

'ß' has also occasionally been used for transliterating Sumerian /ʃ/ ⟨standard transliteration š⟩.

The Sulzbacher Form of ß is somewhat similar in shape to the unrelated lowercase Greek letter "β" (beta). As a consequence, ß has occasionally been used as a surrogate for Greek "β", notably in reference to beta test versions of application programs for older operating systems, whose character encodings (notably Latin-1 and Windows-1252) did not support easy use of Greek letters. Also, the original IBM DOS code page, CP437 (aka OEM-US) conflates the two characters, assigning them the same codepoint (0xE1) and a glyph that minimizes their differences.