Ș

Not to be confused with Ş (S-cedilla).

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe). S-comma consists of an s with a diacritical comma underneath it, and is distinct from s-cedilla.

S-comma

Appearance of comma (upper row) and cedilla (lower row) in the Times New Roman font. Note that the cedilla is placed higher than the comma.

History

The letter was proposed in the Buda Lexicon, a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi and Dialogu pentru inceputul limbei române, introducing ș for /ʃ/ and ț for /ts/.^[1]

S with "half moon" beneath ("s subnotamus signo mediae lunulae") proposed as a letter in the Buda Lexicon. Note that the form is reversed from the modern version, resembling a small C.

S-cedilla, T-cedilla and a cedilla illustrated with a comma in Ortografia limbei române published by the Romanian Academy in 1895.

Unicode support

S-comma was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250. Instead, Ş (S-cedilla), a character available since Unicode 1.1.0 (1993), was used for digital texts written in Romanian. In some contexts, like with low-resolution screens and printouts, the visual distinction between ș and ş is minimal. In 1999, at the request of the Romanian Standardization Association [ro]^{[citation needed]}, S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Microsoft Windows XP, but a later European Union Expansion Font Update provided the feature. While digital accessibility to S-comma has since improved, both characters continue to be used interchangeably in various contexts like publishing.

The letter is part of Unicode's Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", titled as "Latin capital letter S with comma below" (U+0218) and "Latin small letter s with comma below" (U+0219).^[2] In HTML, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

Usage

The letter represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in "show") in Romanian language. On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol Ş/ş (S with cedilla) is used. Example word: Timișoara.

Character encoding

Character information

Preview	Ș		ș
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW		LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	536	U+0218	537	U+0219
UTF-8	200 152	C8 98	200 153	C8 99
Numeric character reference	Ș	Ș	ș	ș

See also

• Ş (S-cedilla)
• Š
• Ț (T-comma)
• D̦ (D-comma)