[1] In Russian, it represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕː/, similar to the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in Welsh-sheep.

Most other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced /ʃ/, an approximation of the Russian pronunciation of the letter, and is often omitted when teaching those languages.

The letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in related words in Belarusian.

[3] The name in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was шта (šta) and is preserved in modern Bulgarian; it is pronounced штъ.

The descender (also used in Ц) has been reinterpreted as a diacritic and used in several letters for non-Slavic languages, such as Ң and Қ.