Long s
The long s, ⟨ſ⟩, also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter ⟨s⟩, found mostly in works from the late 8th to early 19th centuries.
This list of rules for the long s is not exhaustive, and it applies only to books printed during the 17th to early 19th centuries in English-speaking countries.
[citation needed] In general, the long s fell out of use in roman and italic typefaces in professional printing well before the middle of the 19th century.
Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".
They are placed in our list of sorts, not to recommend them, but because we may not be subject to blame from those of the old school, who are tenacious of deviating from custom, however antiquated, for giving a list which they might term imperfect.An individual instance of an important work using s instead of the long s occurred in 1749, with Joseph Ames's Typographical Antiquities, about printing in England 1471–1600, but "the general abolition of long s began with John Bell's British Theatre (1791)".
The same typeset was used for the 1826 printed later by W. Greenough and Son, and the statutes of the United Kingdom's colony Nova Scotia also used the long s as late as 1816.
[citation needed] In printing, instances of the long s continue in rare and sometimes notable cases in the UK until the end of the 19th century, possibly as part of a consciously antiquarian revival of old-fashioned type.
For example: In Germany, Fraktur-family typefaces (such as Tannenberg, used by Deutsche Reichsbahn for station signage, as illustrated above) continued in widespread official use until the "Normal Type" decree of 1941 required that they be phased out.
[c] In place of the first s in a double s, Mathewson recreated the long s in these copies, a practice widely used for both personal and business correspondence by her family, who lived on the remote island of Yell, Shetland.
[citation needed] The long s survives in elongated form, with an italic-styled curled descender, as the integral symbol (∫) used in calculus.
This use first appeared publicly in his paper De Geometria, published in Acta Eruditorum of June 1686,[27] but he had been using it in private manuscripts at least since 29 October 1675.
[28] The integral of a function f(x) with respect to a real variable x over the interval [a, b] is typeset as: In linguistics, a similar character (ʃ, called esh) is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, the first sound in the English word ship.
[citation needed] In Nordic and German-speaking countries, relics of the long s continue to be seen in signs and logos that use various forms of fraktur typefaces.
[citation needed] The long s exists in some current OpenType digital fonts that are historic revivals, like Caslon, Garamond, and Bodoni.
[32][33] An echo of the long s survives today in the form of the mark /, popularly known as a "slash" but formally named a solidus.
The mark is an evolution of the long s which was used as the abbreviation for 'shilling' in Britain's pre-decimal currency, originally written as in 7ſ 6d, later as "7/6", meaning "seven shillings and six pence".
