Long s[edit]

The minuscule form of 's' was '?', called the long s, up to the fourteenth centu
ry or so, and the form 'S' was used then only as uppercase in the same manner th
at the forms 'G' and 'A' are only uppercase. With the introduction of printing,
the modern form 's' began to be used at the end of words by some printers. Later
, it was used everywhere in print and eventually spread to manuscript letters as
well. For example, "sinfulness" would be rendered as "?infulne??" in all mediev
al hands, and later it was "?infulne?s" in some blackletter hands and in print.
The modern spelling "sinfulness" did not become widespread in print until the be
ginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion of '?' with the lowerc
ase 'f' in typefaces which had a very short horizontal stroke in their lowercase
'f'. The ligature of '?s' (or '?z') became the German Eszett, ''.
It is commonly believed that it was the London printer John Bell (1745 1831) who p
opularized the modern "round s", in place of the elongated '?', although exactly
when he did this is unclear. In his multivolume series, The British Theatre, he
began using the short form instead of the elongated letter circa 1785, not enti
rely at first but in later years more and more consistently. His edition of Shak
espeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he "ventured to depart from
the common mode by rejecting the long '?' in favor of the round one, as being l
ess liable to error....."[3] In the field of more ephemeral publications, Bell b
egan a London newspaper called The World, of which it has been said that a "vita
l change ... first made in The World, entitled No. 1 of that paper (for Monday,
January 1, 1787) to be chronicled in any kalendar of typographical progress: the
abolition of the long '?'...."[4] Bell may have popularized it, but he did not
invent it; in his letter of March 26, 1786 to Francis Childs, Benjamin Franklin
wrote "the Round s .... begins to be the Mode, and in nice printing the Long '?'
is rejected entirely."
Usage