ẞ is the capital version of the German letter ß. This capital has quite the history, having only being legalized, that is, becoming officially allowed in German orthography, in 2017.
Now, the two of us go way back, back in elementary school, when we were learning about the letter lowercase ß. Not the uppercase one of course – that was still illegal back then!
I have this vivid memory of smartly pointing out that one could just
substitute ss for an ß, anytime anywhere, in handwriting too.
I was misguided though, as my teacher was quick to point out.1
And I have Microsoft to blame for that one.
You see, I’d been around words before. In Microsoft Word, which ships with a typeface called Copperplate Gothic by default. It’s a capitals-only typeface, so lowercase letters are rendered with Small Capitals.
This means it had to do something2 about ß,
that which I mistook for
ah yes, these two are really just the same thing:
Last year, I visited a really cool exhibition3 on the capital
ẞ, which kind of reinvigorated my interest and started a bet with my
friends as to who’d find a real-world ẞ first – I won, of course :p
Two in one go actually, just outside PREUẞERGÄẞCHEN 2 in Leipzig:
Now, if you will indulge, my collection. Some cool ones, some failures, it’s just whatever’s out in the world.
A very clean one!
Capitals don’t usually go below the baseline. This ẞ does. And I
really, really like it!
Looks okay at first, but notice how the top of ẞ peaks out juuuust
slightly above the other small capitals? I don’t like it, this one
might very well be a lowercase ß!
Here’s another case of that, but this one’s just awful :(
no >:(
It’s a wruff world.
Bold. I like it.
White on yellow is …a choice.
Tasteful!
Sweet!
Another baseline-breaking-but-nice one.
Fun! (Not really, it’s clearly just a small ß)
Handwritten, also lmao
PS: Send me cool ẞ if you have some!
🐾 Footnotes:
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I actually have a few very concrete memories of times I’d been embarrassingly wrong in school. Is this normal? ↩
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For that video/screenshot, I set up Office 2003 on Windows Vista. It may have been possible I was using ‘95 back then, but either way, what a blast from the past. Like, this operating system was so quick and easy to set up, no clicking “no” twenty times, no forced MS account. And it’s such a quick and snappy OS as well. It really puts into perspective just how awful Microslop’s agentically enshittified latest entry to the Windows franchise is… ↩
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Archive link, just in case ↩