The Week in Germany: Culture

July 4, 2008

Big "ß" is Now Officially a German Letter

Big: The new capital "ß" is a jauntier, puffed-up version of its lowercase counterpart. © picture alliance / dpa

Many German learners will recognize the "ß", also known as the "Eszett". That strange looking letter that represents a sharp double-s in the German language has now been officially accepted as an upper case figure in the German alphabet by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Until now, the letter "ß" has only been a lower-case figure, causing all sorts of problems for journalists and advertisers who needed to find ways to avoid capitalizing the letter. Or the big "ß" was simply written as "SS" in situations where capitalization was unavoidable. But now it has been granted official status under the ISO’s "special consonants found in western European languages".

Whether this means that the new character will now be integrated on German computer keyboards however remains unclear. But the capital "ß" has already been integrated in the latest Unicode version – the industry standard consisting of a repertoire of about 100,000 characters that allows computers to represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems.

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Find out more about the German Language at the Goethe Institut

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