s

S (named ess /ˈɛs/, plural esses) is the 19th letter in the Modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. 2History 3Origin Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in 'ship'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth (שנא) and represented the phoneme /ʃ/ via the acrophonic principle. Greek did not have a /ʃ/ phoneme, so the derived Greek letter Sigma (Σ) came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/. While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician šîn, its name sigma and its position in the alphabet is taken from the letter samekh, while the shape of samekh but name and position of šîn is continued in the xi. Within Greek, the name of sigma was influenced by its association with the Greek word σίζω (earlier *sigj-) "to hiss". The original name of the letter "sigma" may have been san, but due to the complicated early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets, "san" came to be identified as a separate letter, Ϻ. Herodotus reports that "San" was the name given by the Dorians to the same letter called "Sigma" by the Ionians. The Western Greek alphabet used in Cumae was adopted by the Etruscans and Latins in the 7th century BC, over the following centuries developing into a range of Old Italic alphabets including the Etruscan alphabet and the early Latin alphabet. In Etruscan, the value /s/ of Greek sigma (