Esh (letter)

This article is about the letter ʃ ("esh"). For the IPA symbol, see voiceless postalveolar fricative.

Not to be confused with the letter ſ (the "long s").

Esh (majuscule: Ʃ Unicode U+01A9, minuscule: ʃ Unicode U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script. Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ  or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English sh). It is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the alphabets of some African languages.

See also

• Long s (the character ſ)
• Sigma (the Greek letter)
• Sh (digraph)
• Sha (the Cyrillic letter)