It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/, like the pronunciation of sh in "ship".

[citation needed] In English, Sha is romanized as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

Sha already possessed its current form in Saints Cyril and Methodius's Glagolitic alphabet.

There is also a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet, which is the same as the Greek alphabet but with a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" (Ϣϣ) which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance.

In a different mathematical context, some authors allude to the shape of the letter Sha when they use the term Shah function for what is otherwise called a Dirac comb.