ß

The ß ? Eszett (IPA {{IPA|/?s?ts?t/}}) in German or scharfes S (sharp S) if spelled out ? is a letter used only in the German alphabet. It alternates with ss under certain conditions, and it is replaced by ss when there is no ß available. ß is nearly unique among the letter of Latin alphabet in that it has no upper case form since it never occurs initially (one of the few other examples is kra, used in Greenlandic).

ß and ?

"ß" should not be confused with the lowercase Greek letter beta ("?"), which it closely resembles, particularly to the eyes of non-German readers, but to which it is unrelated. Indeed the resemblance is not close enough to enable substitution of the one with the other in typeset material without the result looking extremely unprofessional, comparable to substituting lowercase Greek letter omega ("?") for "w" in English text. Any typeset material should use the ß; where that letter is unavailable, the substitution "ss" for "ß" is correct.

Related Topics:
Greek letter - Beta - Omega

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The differences between "ß" and "?" in most typefaces are

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• ? reaches below the line while ß does not, except in handwriting
• ? connects the vertical part on the left with the end of the horizontal near the bottom; ß does not.
• ? uses Greek rules of stroke thickness (slanted strokes are thinnest), ß uses Latin rules (horizontal strokes are thinnest).
• ? is often slightly slanted to the right even in upright fonts, while ß is exactly vertical.

However, such substitution once was common when describing beta test versions of application programs for older operating systems, such as classic Mac OS, whose character encodings did not support easy use of Greek letters. Also, the original IBM DOS codepage, CP437 (aka OEM-US), conflates the two characters, assigning them the same codepoint (0xE1) and a glyph that minimises their differences.

Related Topics:
Beta test - Mac OS - Character encoding - CP437

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Also note that in German handwriting, the ß is written very similar to ?, slightly slanted and reaching below the line.

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