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The letter 'ß' is a letter in the German alphabet. Its German name is 'Eszett' (, lexicalized expression for 'sz') or 'scharfes S' (sharp S).

Contents

Origin in Blackletter as ſ-z

Metamorphosis in Antiqua into ſ-s

Alternative representations of ß in Antiqua

Usage in German

Substitution and all caps

Switzerland and Liechtenstein

Usage before the spelling reform of 1996

Capital ß

ß and β

On keyboards

Miscellaneous

References

Origin in Blackletter as ſ-z

The letter 'ß' originated as a 'ligature of ſ and z' in German blackletter typefaces. The resemblance between ''ß'' and ''ſz'' is obvious in any blackletter font. This ligature had been used since the Middle Ages.
The origin of ''ß'' from long ''ſ'' and ''z'' is reflected in the name Eszett. (A similar case in English is the letter w, whose origin is reflected in the name Double-U, even though its modern shape is that of a double-V.)
The typographer Jan Tschichold claimed that the German blackletter ''ß'' originated as a ligature of ''ſ'' and ''s'', even though a cursory glance at any blackletter font will show that blackletter ''ß'' does not resemble blackletter ''ſs''. Tschichold's conjecture is popular, but not based on any historical evidence.

Metamorphosis in Antiqua into ſ-s

In the late 18th and early 19th century, when more and more German texts were printed in Antiqua, typesetters looked for an antiqua counterpart of the blackletter ''ſz'' ligature, which did not exist in antiqua fonts.
The most common solution was to use a 'ligature of long ſ and (normal) round s'. This ligature was already common in English, French, and Italian, though it later fell into disuse in those languages when the long ſ was abandoned in the 18th century.
Using the ''ſs'' ligature for ß allowed them to preserve the difference between ß and any other letter. The preservation of this difference in antiqua typefaces became obligatory with the increasing standardization of German orthography in the late 19th century.

Alternative representations of ß in Antiqua

There have been four typographical solutions for the form of the antiqua ß. Currently, most antiqua ß are shaped according to the second or the fourth solution. The first and third solution is seldom found.
#letter combination ſs (not as a ligature, but as a single type),
#ligature of ſ and s,
#ligature of ſ and a kind of blackletter z that looks similar to an "" (ezh) or a "3", though it might rather be described as a "hooked z" () (this solution resembles the original blackletter ligature),
#a ligature ''ſ'' and a kind of ''3'' so that the ligature resembles a Greek β (a compromise of the second and the third solution).

Usage in German

Since the German spelling reform of 1996, either ''ß'' or ''ss'' is used for the representation of an /s/ in a syllable onset (where a normal ''s'' would be pronounced /z/) as follows:
# ''ß'' is used after long vowels, for instance in ''grüßen'' (‘to greet’) or in the related words ''grüßt'' (‘greets’), ''grüß!'' (‘greet!’);
# ''ß'' is used after diphthongs, for instance ''beißen'' (‘to bite’) or in the related words ''beißt'' (‘bites’), ''beiß!'' (‘bite!’);
# ''ss'' is used after short vowels, for instance ''küssen'' (‘to kiss’) or in the related words ''küsst'' (‘kisses’), ''küss!'' (‘kiss!’).
Note that 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’).

Substitution and all caps

If no ''ß'' is available, ''ss'' is used instead. This applies especially to all caps or small caps texts because ''ß'' is not generally considered to have majuscule form. Excepted are all caps names in legal documents; they may retain an ''ß'' to prevent ambiguity, e.g., ''HANS STRAßER''.
This ''ss'' that replaces an ''ß'' had to be hyphenated as a single letter before the German spelling reform of 1996, for instance ''Stra-sse'' (‘street’); compare ''Stra-ße''. After the reform, it is hyphenated like other double consonants: ''Stras-se''.^[1]

Switzerland and Liechtenstein

In Switzerland and Liechtenstein ''ss'' usually replaces every ''ß''. This is officially sanctioned by the German orthography rules, which state in §25 E₂: ''In der Schweiz kann man immer „ss“ schreiben'' (In Switzerland, you can always write "ss").
The ''ß'' has been gradually abolished since the 1930s, when most cantons decided not to teach it anymore and when the Swiss postal service stopped using it in place names. In 1974, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung was the last Swiss newspaper to give up the ''ß''. Today, Swiss publishing houses only use the ''ß'' for books that address the entire German-speaking market.
One reason for the abolition of the ''ß'' may have been the increasing use of typewriters. Since Swiss typewriters were designed to be usable in the German speaking part of Switzerland as well as in French speaking part, they contained accented French letters (''ç'', ''à'', ''é'', ''è'') as well as German umlauts (''ü'', ''ä'', ''ö'') and consequently had no key to spare for ''ß''.

Usage before the spelling reform of 1996

Before the German spelling reform of 1996, there was an additional rule that “ß” should be used at the end of a word (e.g., ''naß'', 'wet') or word-component (e.g., ''Naßrasur'', 'wet shave'), or before a consonant (e.g., ''wäßrig'', 'watery'), even if it follows a short vowel, but must otherwise be replaced by “ss” (e.g., ''Wasser'', 'water'). As a result, ''floss'' ('flowed') was formerly spelled ''floß'', and the spelling ''Floß'' was ambiguous between a capitalised ''floss'' (with short vowel) and the noun ''Floß'' ('raft', with long vowel — all nouns are capitalised in German).
The spelling reform also affected exonymic place names, e.g., "Rußland" (''Russia'') became "Russland", and "Preßburg" (''Bratislava'') became "Pressburg"; the English used ''Pressburg'' as the name of the city anyway, until the use of ''Bratislava'' became common in the decade after the independence of Czechoslovakia.
The pre-1996 orthography encouraged the use of ''SZ'' in all caps texts in cases where ''SS'' would produce an ambiguous result, as with "IN MASZEN" (in limited amounts; "Maß"=measure) vs. "IN MASSEN" (in massive amounts; "Masse"=mass). The number of such cases was so small that this rule was more confusing than helpful, since most people used the writing ''SS'' anyway; thus it has been dropped. Only in the German military, the capitalization ''SZ'' is still in occasional use, even when there is no ambiguity — e.g., boxes inscribed ''SCHIESZGERÄT'' (“shooting materials”) can still be found occasionally. The same is true for architectural drawings, which often use capital letters and where both "MASZE" and "MASSE" are quite frequent. ''sz'' is also still used for ''ß'' in military teletype operation within Germany.

Capital ß

Main articles: Capital ß

''ß'' is nearly unique among the letters of Latin alphabet in that it has no traditional upper case form (one of the few other examples is kra, which was used in Greenlandic). This is because it never occurs initially, and traditional German printing (which used blackletter) never used all-caps.

There have been repeated attempts to introduce an upper case ß. Such letterforms can be found in some older German books and some modern signage and product design. One of the best known examples is the Eastern German 1957 Duden.
A recent proposal to the Unicode Consortium for ''capital double s'' by Andreas Stötzner was rejected in 2004, on the basis that capital ß is a typographical issue, and therefore not suitable for character encoding. Stötzner's proposal was resubmitted, and as of 2007, the capital ß character looks likely to be encoded.
On 2007-04-25 a new proposal was madeAndreas Stötzner: Capital Double S. Proposal to the Unicode Consortium (PDF)..

ß and β

"ß" should not be confused with the lowercase Greek letter beta ("β"), which it closely resembles, particularly to the eyes of non-German or non-Greek readers, but to which it is unrelated. Indeed the resemblance is ''not'' close enough to enable substitution of the one with the other in typeset material without the result looking extremely unprofessional, comparable to substituting lowercase Greek letter omega ("ω") for "w" in English text. Any typeset material should use the ß; where that letter is unavailable, the substitution "ss" for "ß" is correct and clearly preferable to the use of Greek beta.
The differences between "ß" and "β" in most typefaces are:

★ β reaches below the line while ß does not

★ β connects the vertical part on the left with the end of the horizontal near the bottom; ß does not.

★ β uses Greek rules of stroke thickness (slanted strokes are thinnest), ß uses Latin rules (horizontal strokes are thinnest).

★ β is often slightly slanted to the right even in upright fonts, while ß is exactly vertical.
However, such substitution once was common when describing beta test versions of application programs for older operating systems, such as classic Mac OS, whose character encodings did not support easy use of Greek letters. Also, the original IBM DOS code page, CP437 (aka OEM-US), which was designed by English speaking persons with limited knowledge of German spelling customs, conflates the two characters, assigning them the same codepoint (0xE1) and a glyph that minimises their differences.
Also note that in German handwriting and in Fraktur, the ß is written very similar to β, reaching below the line with the bottom loop connected to the vertical line.

On keyboards

In Germany and Austria, the letter ß is present on computer and typewriter keyboards, normally to the right on the upper row. 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.
;Macintosh
:Option+s
;Microsoft Windows
Alt+0223 or Alt+225 or (if not used otherwise) Ctrl+Alt+s, on some keybords such as US-International also AltGr+s
;X-based systems
:AltGr+s or Compose, s, s
;GNU Emacs
:C-x 8 " s
;GNOME
:Ctrl-Shift-DF or (in GNOME versions 2.15 and later) Ctrl-Shift-U, df
The Vim and GNU Screen digraph is ss.

Miscellaneous

When ordering German words alphabetically, the collation rules say that "ß" should be treated as if it were a double "s". So, for example: "Ruß" < "Russe" < "rußen" < "Russland".
In word processing contexts, the "ß" is sometimes associated with the umlaut, for a purely practical reason: both the "ß" and true umlauts (ä, ö, ü) are not in ASCII. Thus they tend to cause the same kinds of problems in all sorts of legacy digital text processing applications. Historically, the development of "ß" is not related with the umlauts, and they are not associated outside of character encoding contexts.
The ß is sometimes used in German writing to indicate the pronunciation of an s-sound where the letter s would be pronounced otherwise; an initial s in Standard German is pronounced much like the letter z in English. The novels ''NeuLand'' and ''OstWind'' by Luise Endlich, for example, use an initial ß to approximate the local dialect in Frankfurt (Oder); thus ''ßind ßie?'' ("Sind Sie?").
The ß is also used by some in romanizing the Sumerian language, in which it represents ''sh''. Some Sumerian scholars use ''sz'' or ''$'' instead.
The ß character is popular in Hungarian "text speak" used with mobile phones, replacing the grapheme 'sz', thus using one letter fewer in the SMS. For the same reason, some Swiss Germans also use it for any ss in a SMS.
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 the Netherlands ß is called "Ringel-s" (though Dutch does not use it), which derives from German ''ringeln'' (to form a loop, said e.g. of a pig's tail). This name is unknown to most Germans.

References

1. Peter Gallmann (1997): "Warum die Schweizer weiterhin kein Eszett schreiben. Zugleich:
Eine Anmerkung zu Eisenbergs Silbengelenk-Theorie". In: Augst, Gerhard;
Blüml, Karl; Nerius, Dieter; Sitta, Horst (Eds.) ''Die Neuregelung der deutschen Rechtschreibung. Begründung und Kritik.'' Tübingen: Niemeyer (= ''Reihe Germanistische Linguistik'', Vol. 179) pages 135–140.[1], p. 5.