The Letter

ITC Anna

ITC Bookman Demi

Bellevue

Just about any way you look at
it, the S is a complicated letter.
Its evolution has had more
reverse curves than its shape.
Even in its rendering, the S is
one of the most complicated
characters to draw.

The tangled story of our
nineteenth letter probably
begins with the early Egyptians
and their hieroglyph for the s
sound. This first ancestor to
our S was represented by the
drawing of a sword. Later, in
the Egyptians’ hieratic writing,
the sword was simplified and
began to look more like a short
piece of barbed wire than a
weapon of war.

When the Phoenicians built
their alphabet on the Egyptian
model, they rotated the piece of
barbed wire 90° and called it
sameth, which meant “post.”
The Greeks, in turn, adopted
this letter, but didn’t use it to
represent the s sound, creating a
detour on that particular twist
in the road of its evolution.

At the same time that the
Egyptians were using the sym¬
bol of a sword to represent the

s sound, they also used a sym¬
bol for a field of land to repre¬
sent the sh sound. In their hier¬
atic writing the symbol was,
like other hieroglyphs, simpli¬
fied in form. But unfortunately
for the Egyptian scribes, it
became more complex in
usage. The reason? The Egyp¬
tians allowed as many as nine
different versions of the sym¬
bol to exist at the same time.
There were so many, in fact,
that one wonders how they
kept track of things.

The Phoenicians dropped
most of these Egyptian sh
sound characters and settled
on something that looked like
our w to represent the sh sound
in their language. The Phoeni¬
cians called their rendition of
the letter shin or sin, which
meant “teeth.”

The Greeks borrowed the
shin from the Phoenicians, but
drew it with three, four, and
sometimes even five strokes. In
some cases it hardly resembled
the original Phoenician sym¬
bol, but in each the basic zigzag
shape of the letter was main¬

tained. In its latest Greek ren¬
dition, the character became
the sigma, which resembles our
capital M lying on its side.

The Romans used a form of
the sigma that omitted the
lower horizontal stroke of the
character and made it look a
little like a backward Z. Over
time, however, the Romans
reshaped the sharp angles of
the sigma into softer, rounded
forms, then completed its cur¬
rent graceful shape.

But the story of the S did
not end with the ancient
Romans; there were still a few
twists and turns left to its lin¬
eage. As late as the mid-eigh¬
teenth century, a lowercase
version of the letter, which
stood for the long s sound and
looked remarkably like a low¬
ercase f, was used in English
manuscripts. And even today,
the German language uses a
letter called an eszett that
resembles a capital В and rep¬
resents the double lowercase s
(a combination of long and
short s sounds) in words like
strasse and weiss.

Bodega Serif Medium

The S is a narrow letter, its
width being about half its
height. Since it is rounded, and
would appear short otherwise,
it is also designed to slightly
overlap the baseline and exceed
the normal cap height.

To provide the S with a firm
foundation on which to rest,
the optical center should be
positioned above the true cen¬
ter, making the upper half of
the letter appear smaller than
the lower. In some typefaces,
like Trajanus and Albertus, this
arrangement is reversed, mak¬
ing the top counter look bigger
than the bottom one. But even

The S can vaunt more per¬
sonality than most other char¬
acters. In Windsor it rears back
like a snake about to strike; in
Nicholas Cochin it has the list
of a drunken sailor; and in
Letraset’s University Roman it
has the opulence of old money.

S S

Windsor Nicholas

Light Cochin

The S is, in many ways, a
complicated letter. Fortunately
for readers and type designers,
it is also exceptionally beautiful.

s

ITC Benguiat Book

ITC Serif Gothic

Futura Light

Insignia Alternate

Frutiger

Gill Sans

Albertus

when this is the case, the S
should never appear as having
been drawn upside down.

Adobe Garamond
Alternate Italic

Arnold Böcklin

ITC Kabel Ultra

ITC Ozwald

Broadway

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