Long "S" Usage

"The s that looks like an f in old manuscripts and books is called a "long s" or "medial s." It was a form of s used initially or medially. In other words, anywhere in a word but at the end. The ending s was called a round s, or terminal s. The rules for how it was to be used varied over the centuries and could be fairly complicated. Many ancient alphabets such as Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc, have different versions of the same letter for use under specific circumstances or in specific placements: beginning of a word (initial), in the middle of a word (medial), or at the end of a word (final). The long s evolved with the emergence of the minuscule letters (small letters) during the Carolingian writing reformation (9th C.), and has its roots in classical Greek practice. By the beginning of the 1800s the long s faded in use, disappearing completely by the mid-1800s. It's disuse was sparked by typographic reforms; Caslon stopped using the long s in the late-1780s, as did most other typographers by 1800. As typographers stopped casting the long s for their new fonts, and publications like the New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica stopped using it, people stopped seeing it in print. Consequently use of the long s in handwriting began to fade as well."

~Mar 16, 2017, Don Marsh~
©Don Marsh