What ẞ means
It is the capital form of German ß.
Set a German word with ß in all caps or small caps and use ẞ there: Straße becomes STRAẞE. In mixed-case text, lowercase ß remains the ordinary form; the capital changes the letter's case, not its sound.
Where did ẞ come from?
The lowercase sharp s grew from medieval German ligatures.
A recognizable ligature appears around 1300 in Wolfdietrich, an epic poem. One line of development joined long ſ to tailed ʒ; printers using Antiqua, a Roman-style type, also formed ſs. These are routes to the sharp-s letter, not depictions of today's capital ẞ.
Why was an uppercase ß needed?
Capital text needed a clear way to keep ß distinct.
The letter served German spelling: sz or ſʒ represented a voiceless s, while tz represented the [ts] sound sequence. Blackletter (Fraktur) and Roman-style Antiqua developed separate ligature traditions; the 1901 spelling unification treated them as one letter.
All-capital lines made the missing capital noticeable, especially in Antiqua headings and names. In 1901, SZ was recommended as a substitute; in 1941, SS became standard. That makes WEISSE ambiguous: it can stand for Weiße or Weisse.
Formal, typographic German: ẞ marks a deliberate all-caps spelling, especially when a person's name should stay distinct.
In a name, replacing ß with SS can make two spellings indistinguishable.
Drift: As of 2026, German rules allow ẞ alongside SS in all-caps spelling; the option entered official orthography in 2017. Unicode 17.0.0 still maps ß to SS by default, so automatic capitalization may produce SS.
Part of the collection
Who writes ẞ
Loading…
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsThe writer preserves ß inside an uppercase spelling.
Don't confuse it with
3
SS ẞ vs SS: SS is the traditional substitute, but it can hide whether the original spelling had ß or two s letters.
Related characters
3
ſs Printers using Antiqua also formed the sharp s as this long-s-plus-s sequence, a separate historical route to the letter.
Questions people ask
1Why does software turn ß into SS?
Unicode's default case mapping still turns ß into SS; software must select the separate ẞ character to preserve the single-letter form.
More like this
10
Collections with ẞ
8
How to type or find ẞ
- Also called
- uppercase Eszett · großes Eszett
- Search it as
- eszett · German ẞ · ß uppercase · ẞ vs SS
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ẞ\1E9ECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.