U00DF

U+00DF is the Unicode code point for the Latin small letter sharp s, commonly known as eszett or scharfes s. It is a lowercase letter used primarily in German orthography to represent the s sound after long vowels or diphthongs, as in Straße or weiß.

In Unicode, U+00DF sits in the Latin-1 Supplement block. In UTF-8 it is encoded as two bytes: 0xC3 0x9F. In legacy encodings such as ISO/IEC 8859-1 it corresponds to 0xDF. In HTML it can be written as ß or with the named entity ß.

Usage and typography: ß marks the /s/ sound that follows long vowels or diphthongs in German. Historically, the uppercase form was not a dedicated capital letter, with SS used in all-caps contexts. Unicode also provides a distinct capital sharp s as U+1E9E (ẞ), and some modern texts and fonts use ẞ, though practice varies and many all-caps conventions still employ SS. In Swiss standard German, ß is typically avoided in favor of ss.

Origin: The character originated as a ligature in German blackletter typography, combining elements of the long s (ſ) and the normal s to denote the double-s sound after long vowels. Over time it became standardized as a separate letter in German orthography.

In computing, ß is widely supported in Unicode-enabled environments and remains an important part of German orthography, with occasional discussion about capitalization and typographic forms in official guidelines.