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The ess-tsett ("ß") is a letter used only in the German alphabet. It represents the ligature "ss" under certain conditions (cf. the letter W, which represents a ligature, too: "double u"). "ß" is unique among the letters of western alphabets in that it has no majuscule; "SS" must be used in an all-caps environment. "ß" should not be confused with the lowercase Greek letter beta ("β"), which it closely resembles, particularly to the eyes of non-German readers, but to which it is unrelated.
The name ess-tsett is a phonetic circumscription of how the two letters "s" and "z" are pronounced in German. This is meant to reflect that ß derives from a ligature of the long or medial "s ("ſ") and "z".
There is some controversy on whether this is historically correct. In the past, some influential scholars, most notably Jan Tschichold in 1940 ("Herkunft und Form des ß in der Fraktur und der Antiqua"), have argued that the letter actually derives from the long "s" and the short or terminal "s" (now the conventional minuscule letterform). Such a ligature certainly existed for example in old French handwriting, and Tschichold also presents a speculation for the evolution of ß in Fraktur type. He concludes that the naming "sz" is entirely incorrect.
Though this view has been believed, defended and taught by many with reference to this authority, others have since pointed out that it is too simplistic (and, specifically, that the Fraktur forms speculated on by Tschichold do not exist), for example, more recently, Max Bollwage in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1999. As, in any case, "ß" derives from a ligature, the discussion has to focus on historical orthography, and in fact, in old texts both the "ſz" and the "ſs" writing can be found. Typically, in Blackletter typefaces like Gothic or Fraktur, the ligature "long s + z" is used (see illustration). On the other hand, in Antiqua types as used in modern scripture, the composition of "ß" as "long s + terminal s" seems graphically more plausible, depending on the particular font implementation.
In today's German orthography, "ß" (like other "simple" consonants) is used after a long vowel, while "ss" (like other "doubled" consonants) is used after a short one. Both represent the sound /s/; a solitary "s" has the value /z/ (although this is devoiced at the end of a word). For example, Fuß (/fu:s/, German for "foot") has a long vowel, while Fluss (/flUs/, meaning "river") has a short vowel (cf. the difference of engl. "c(e)" and "ss" in "mice" and "miss").
Until the German spelling reform in 1998, an additional rule prescribed that "ss" would never be used at the end of a syllable and be replaced by "ß", even if it followed a short vowel. In other words, "ss" was only used when hyphenation would occur between the two s's. As a result, Fluss was formerly spelled Fluß, even though the plural has always been Flüsse (hyphenated Flüs-se); the new rule alleviates this irregularity. This is to accord with the orthography of other consonants, which are single after a long vowel and double after a short one; for example, Wal /va:l/ with a long "a" and Ball /bal/ with a short one.
This new usage of "ß" is now standard in Germany and Austria, but Switzerland had abolished the use of "ß" in the 1930s already and uses "ss" in all cases.
The ß is also used by some in romanizing the Sumerian language.
The HTML entity for "ß" is ß.
Its codepoint in ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-9, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16 and identically in Unicode is 223, or DF in hexadecimal.
