page_title: ß
section_title: Keyboards and encoding
hierarchical_section_title: ß / Representation / Keyboards and encoding
caption_attribution_description: Upper right portion of a German 1964 Olympia typewriter showing the placement of ß and umlauts. Detail of Wikimedia commons image Photographer: Arnold Paul, 2006-03-02
context_page_description: In German orthography, the grapheme ß, called Eszett or scharfes S, represents the phoneme in Standard German, specifically when following long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels.
  The name Eszett combines the names of the letters of s and z in German. The character's Unicode names in English are sharp s and eszett.
  It originates as the sz digraph as used in Old High German and Middle High German orthography, represented as a ligature of long s and tailed z in blackletter typography, which became conflated with the ligature for long s and round s used in Roman type.
  The grapheme has an intermediate position between letter and ligature.
  It behaves as a ligature in that it has no separate position in the alphabet. In alphabetical order, it is treated as the equivalent of ⟨ss⟩.
  It behaves like a letter in that its use is prescribed by orthographical rules and conveys phonological information.
  Traditionally, it did not have a capital form, although some type designers introduced de facto capitalized variants of ß.
  In 2017, the Council for German Orthography ultimately adopted capital ß into German orthography, ending a long orthographic debate.
context_section_description: In Germany and Austria, the letter ß is present on computer and typewriter keyboards, normally to the right on the upper row. 
  The German typewriter keyboard layout was defined in DIN 2112, first issued in 1928.
  In other countries, the letter is not marked on the keyboard, but a combination of other keys can produce it. Often, the letter is input using a modifier and the s key. The details of the keyboard layout depend on the input language and operating system, such as Ctrl+Alt+s, on some keyboards such as US-International also AltGr+s in Microsoft Windows or Option+s on the US, US-Extended, and UK keyboards in macOS. In Windows, one can also use alt code 0223.
  Some modern virtual keyboards show ß when the user presses and holds the s key.
  The HTML entity for ß is &szlig;.  Its code point in the ISO 8859 character encoding versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16 and identically in Unicode is 223, or DF in hexadecimal. In TeX and LaTeX, \ss produces ß. A German language support package for LaTeX exists in which ß is produced by "s (similar to umlauts, which are produced by "a, "o, and "u with this package).
  In modern browsers, "ß" will be converted to "SS" when the element containing it is set to uppercase using text-transform: uppercase in Cascading Style Sheets. The JavaScript in Google Chrome will convert "ß" to "SS" when converted to uppercase (e.g. "ß".toUpperCase()).
  Parts 
  1, 
  2, 
  3, 
  4, 
  9, 
  10, 
  13, 
  14, 
  15, 
  16 
  (i.e. excluding 5, 6, 7, 8, 11)
  Code pages 
  1250, 
  1252, 
  1254, 
  1257, 
  1258 
  (i.e. excluding 1251, 1253, 1255, 1256)
  Mac OS 
  Roman, 
  Icelandic,Croatian,Central European,Celtic,Gaelic,Romanian, 
  Greek,Turkish
  The \SS macro exists as the uppercase counterpart of \ss, but displays as a doubled capital S.
caption: The ß key (as well as Ä, Ö, and Ü) on a 1964 German typewriter
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