Q9691

ß is a letter of the German alphabet. In German it is called ' (, ) or (, ). It represents the phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs. In English, it is called double s, eszett, or sharp s'. It is currently used only in German, and can be typographically replaced with the double-s digraph if the character is unavailable. In the 20th century, was replaced with in the spelling of Swiss Standard German (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), 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 (long s) and (tailed z) in blackletter typefaces, yielding .{{efn|The IPA symbol ezh (ʒ) somewhat resembles the blackletter z (\mathfrak{z}) and is used in this article for convenience despite its technical inaccuracy. The preferred form of transcription by Unicode is the "hooked z" (ȥ), a toned-down version of the tailed z in 19th-century printed texts.}} 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.