U+00DF "ß" Latin Small Letter Sharp S Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ß
U+00DF "ß" Latin Small Letter Sharp S is a unique letter in the German alphabet, historically derived from a ligature of “ſz” (long s and z) and used to represent the voiceless s sound, as in the word “Straße” (street). It is primarily employed in German orthography, where it appears only in lowercase and is typically capitalized as “SS” in all-caps writing, though a capital “ẞ” (U+1E9E) has been officially recognized since 2017. Outside of German, the character is rarely used but appears in a few other languages and contexts, such as in some orthographies for Romansh and occasionally in linguistic transcription.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00DF |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Latin Small Letter Sharp S |
| Block | Latin-1 Supplement |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ß |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ß |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC3 0x9F |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00DF |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000DF |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00df |