S

Its name in English is spelled ess (pronounced /ɛs/) or generally es- when part of a compound word, plural esses. S is normally pronounced as /s/ in most languages, although it may also be pronounced as /z/ (as in the Portuguese mesa, the English does, or the German sein) or as /ʃ/ (as in the Portuguese botas in the Carioca accent or as in the Hungarian kis).


History
Semitic Šîn ("teeth") represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in ship). Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma (Σ) came to represent /s/.In Etruscan and Latin, the value was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds, such as voiceless postalveolar fricative in Hungarian and German (before p, t) or the voiced alveolar fricative in English, French and German.
Care must be taken for incompletely anglicised words from German and proper names from that language. The trigraph "sch" is pronounced like the English digraph "sh." When S is followed either by a p or t, it is pronounced with the same "sh" sound, but when starting a word followed by a vowel, it is pronounced like the English "z," (not the German one).

An alternative form of s, ſ, called the long s or medial s, was used at the beginning or in the middle of the word; the modern form, the short or terminal s, was used at the end of the word.For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "ſinfulneſs" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with the minuscule f.