Thursday 27 September 2018

27 September: The Letter S

Today is S Day, according to the Immortal Society. 


Letter S
  1. S is the 19th letter of the Latin alphabet and the seventh most common letter in the English language, and the third most common consonant (after t and n). It's the most common letter for words to begin and end with.
  2. In many western languages, adding S to the end of a word makes it plural. It is also the regular ending of English third person present tense verbs (eg. He runs).
  3. It derived from the Greek letter Sigma, (Σ) which in turn derives from the Greek word for “to hiss”. The letter as we know it came about by people dropping one line from Sigma.
  4. The equivalent in the Jewish alphabet is Shin.
  5.  … and in the NATO phonetic language, it's Sierra.
  6. In medieval times there were two versions of the letter s in English. As well as S as we know it they also had the minuscule form, known as the long s, originally used in Visigothic and Carolingian scripts. It's most often seen on old gravestones and commemorative stones in churches, and looks rather like a letter f. It mostly fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century. The long s was used in the body of words while s as we know it usually only appeared at the end of words.
  7. S is the chemical symbol for sulphur.
  8. Also in science, it is used as the symbol for entropy, the S-block of the Periodic Table, which includes alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, and hydrogen and Helium, Serine, an amino acid, and a computer programming language dealing with statistics and graphics.
  9. In British postcodes, S denotes Sheffield and surrounding areas.
  10. Percy Bysshe Shelley used S as a pen name.



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