Q When was ‘ f’ first used to represent ‘s’ in old documents and why?
Christine Coaker, Essex
A It never was. For several
centuries, European writing and typography employed a lower-case letter known as the ‘ long’ or ‘medial’ s. It looks like an f, but doesn’t have the cross-bar through the middle. It’s actually an ‘ ’. (Though at some points in its history it did feature a little nub in the middle, but only sticking out of the left side.) However, most of us believe that what we are seeing on old British and colonial American documents and books is an f.
The medial s originated in Roman handwriting – originally looking something like a modern tick – and was most frequently used at the start of words (and almost never at the end). It was also combined with other letters as ligatures (a character containing two or more letters, eg or ) and in words with a double-s, where it always came first, eg mi s or congre s.
The story of its use across different eras and societies is complex; in some places, especially in eastern Europe, it could also denote a separate sound to s.
Its typographical decline began from the middle of the 18th century. Printers disliked it as they had to maintain large stocks of expensive metal type. The Times, which was once seen as setting standards in correct English, retired it in 1803. It survived in handwriting, though, until much later in the 19th century.
There were some hangovers, however. The slash mark that Britons used to employ to denote ‘shilling’ – eg 2/6 – started as a long s (an abbreviation of the Latin ‘solidus’). The elongated form is also used in calculus to represent the integral, while the German ‘Eszett’ or ‘sharp s’ – ß, denoting a double-s sound – is also thought to be partly derived from the long s.