Latin Small Letter Sharp S
Part of Accented Latin Letters
On Windows, hold Alt and type 0223 on the numeric keypad to insert latin small letter sharp s.
- Alt code
- Alt+0223
- HTML entity
- ß
- Unicode
- U+00DF
About this symbol
The German sharp s, or Eszett, began as a long s ſ joined to a z, and its shape still shows the two letters. Switzerland and Liechtenstein write ss instead, and the 1996 German spelling reform cut its use, so Fluss replaced Fluß.
For a long time it had no capital. Unicode added one, ẞ, in 2008, and the Council for German Orthography accepted it in 2017.
Unicode facts
- Official name
- LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
- Also called
- Eszett
- Type
- Lowercase letter
- Unicode block
- Latin-1 Supplement
- Unicode group
- Lowercase letters
- Added in
- Unicode 1.1 (1993)
- Unicode notes
- German
- Not used in Swiss High German
- Uppercase is “SS” (standard case mapping), alternatively 1E9E
- Typographically the glyph for this character can be based on a ligature of 017F with either 0073 or with an old-style glyph for 007A (the latter similar in appearance to 0292). Both forms exist interchangeably today.
Click the symbol or any value at the top of the page to copy it. See the full Accented Latin Letters chart for related characters.