Word.ws English Dictionary

long s

long s noun: the ſ character, as distinct from the short s (which is the s character).

long s: the ſ character, as distinct from the short s (which is the s character)
Image: 1st United States Congress, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

long s (plural long s's)

  1. The ſ character, as distinct from the short s (which is the s character).
    • An instance lately occurred of a work so divided (a prayer-book), where the first part was printed with long s’s, and the last part with round, independent of other deviations;1824, J[ohn] Johnson, Typographia, or the Printers’ Instructor: […], volume II, London: […] Messrs. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, […], page 27
    • The Bible itself was quite unknown ground until I was ten and stumbled upon the Apocrypha in an old edition of the Bible printed with long s’s and beautiful early type.1914, Una Hunt, Una Mary: The Inner Life of a Child, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, page 43

Synonyms of long s

Forms of long s

plurallong s's
alternative formlong ess

Questions about long s

What does long s mean?
Long s means the ſ character, as distinct from the short s (which is the s character).
What part of speech is long s?
Long s is a noun.
What is the plural of long s?
The plural of long s is long s's.

Words near long s in the dictionary

  1. long row to hoe
  2. long rows to hoe
  3. long run
  4. long run for a short slide
  5. long runs
  6. long s
  7. long s's
  8. Long Sault
  9. long scale
  10. long screwdriver
  11. long screwdrivers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: long s (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “long s.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/long_s. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.