Typography Word of the Day: Ess-Tset

“Double-S”, in German

The ess-tset, in Adobe Garamond italic and regular

This curious character looks like the Greek glyph for ‘beta’, but is most assuredly not.

It is a letter commonly found in German, something of the 27th letter of the alphabet, the ‘ess-tset’, and it’s used to express the “ss” in such words as Strasse (road). The term for it is a combination of the German words for the letter s and z (“tset”), and perhaps this is why an alternate way of referring to it is “sharp s” (scharfer ess).

It’s commonly accepted that the letter evolved from connecting the so-called “long s” (that’s the glyph on the US Consitution that makes the first line look as though it starts “In Congrefs”), which was a common typographic alternative to the regular s for space-saving, to the short (regularly-written) minuscule s. The examples included should strongly suggest a connection (ligature) between the two forms.

At one time, says Bringhurst, the ess-tset was important in typesetting English, but obviously is no longer. It is still, as mentioned, an essential part of German, replacing “ss” in such words as river (der Fluß)and the aforementioned der Straße. There are rules for such substitutions, and they have been simplfied since a German-language spelling reform enacted in 1996 that is still being argued over in the German-speaking countries of Europe (principally Switzerland, Germany, and Austria).

Street sign in Berlin, Germany, featuring a style of ess-tset (courtesy Wikipedia entry on ess-tset, photographer not known).