Word.ws English Dictionary

short s

short s noun: the s character, as distinct from the long s — the ſ character.

Noun

short s (plural short s's)

  1. The s character, as distinct from the long s — the ſ character.
    • Most of it was in modern face of a bad cut, small pica size; the apocrypha was in long primer, old style face, although having short s’s, but the peculiarity was that one signature in the Psalms was in old style with long s’s.1888 November, The American Bookmaker: A Journal of Technical Art and Information, […], volume VII, number 5, New York, N.Y.: Howard Lockwood & Co., […], page 146
    • The following changes have silently been made: long s’s have been changed to short s’s;2004, Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, “Preface”, in Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress, Oak Knoll Press, page xxxiii
    Synonyms:
    round s, terminal s

Synonyms of short s

Forms of short s

pluralshort s's
alternative formshort ess

Questions about short s

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

Words near short s in the dictionary

  1. short reckonings make long friends
  2. short rib
  3. short ribs
  4. short run
  5. short runs
  6. short s
  7. short s's
  8. short sale
  9. short sales
  10. short scale
  11. short sea

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: short 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: “short s.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/short_s. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.