Why Did They Write the Letter “s” Like “f”?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Melissa calling from Montreal, Quebec.

Hi, Melissa.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

So I was at an exhibit that was about gendered cultures in beer and fermentation industries, like starting from way back in the 1600s, like all the way to now.

And my friends and I, who were also word nerds, were standing around this book that was under a display case that was super old.

It was from 1690-something.

We noticed that the S’s in a lot of the words in this book had been replaced with a lowercase f without a cross.

And we were trying to figure out what the pattern for that was because not all of the words were replaced with a lowercase f.

So, for example, some of the words that used the f were cheese, strength, somewhat, and reason.

And then some of the words that used S were stomach, husband, thus, and salt.

So, yeah, my question for you guys is what is the pattern?

Is there a pattern and what is up with this weird S?

Well, first, chief. I would like to eat some chief. That would be amazing.

Nacho chief.

The other thing I want to say is not only is it amazing that you’re looking at something so old like that book from the 1600s, but that you can still read it, even with the weird typography, right?

The other thing is, the final thing is, I guess, not final, but that’s not an F.

It’s still an S.

Even though it looks like an F, it’s still, it’s called a long S.

And there was this thing that happened when typography first happened.

When we first started coming up with mechanical printed documents, many of the typefaces were borrowed from the Roman era.

And they had this character that represented an S that appeared in the middle of documents that was a kind of S.

So you had one version of it at the beginning of a word, another one in the middle.

And we kind of half borrowed it, as did many of the other languages in Europe.

And for a long time, for centuries, following different kinds of rule sets, and I’m going to put a little note to come back to that later, you would use that long S in certain circumstances.

Now, in the 1700s, it was one thing, and in the 1400s, it was another, but there was some consistency.

And if you were working in French or Italian or Welsh or German, your rules might be different.

But in English in general, the regular S would be used for capital letters.

Like you won’t find a long capital S.

So you would use the nice snake-shaped one.

You tend to use it at the beginning of words.

And if you look at the U.S. Bill of Rights, at the very top of the document, the original document, Congress of the United States, you can see another one of the rules at play.

You can’t have two long Fs right after each other.

So any word that has a double S, the first one is going to be the long S, and the second one is going to be the standard curvy snake S, or the round S as it’s known.

So writing the name Melissa.

Yeah, Melissa would be M-I-L-I long S, round S, A.

Yeah.

And the long S is the one that looks like an F?

Yeah, it looks like an F.

It either doesn’t have a crossbar, it only has a tiny bit of a crossbar that goes out, I believe, to the left only.

And it tends to be, in some typefaces or some handwriting, a little longer than the F as well.

The bottom of it extends further below the baseline of the writing.

But it’s not 100% consistent.

If you want like a full examination of this, there is a really interesting blog entry by the antiquarian Adam, I’m sorry, Andrew West.

He’s got a blog called Babelstone, B-A-B-L-S-T-O-N-E, Babelstone.

And in 2006, he realized that he needed to explain the long S to people because people didn’t get it.

He was sharing all these wonderful old documents.

People were like, what is the deal?

Just like you, Melissa, with this long S.

And so he came up with this bullet point list of all these different characteristics of the long S in general.

And he kind of also talks about how it changed over time and when we actually stopped using it, which is roughly in the United States, early 1800s, we stopped using the long S for the most part.

Occasionally, people would resurrect it for very formal documents.

Mostly it disappeared by then.

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I actually have a picture of the book if I could email it to you.

Yeah, sure. Send it along. We’d love to see it.

And is it all right if we share that picture on our website or our social media?

Yeah, absolutely.

Awesome.

Thank you very much.

Melissa, thank you for calling.

No, thank you so much.

I really love your show.

Seriously, it’s one of my favorites.

Take care now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know that you and your friends were standing around discussing some point of language, and you thought, I wonder where we can ask a question about that.

Well, this is the place.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.