Word.ws English Dictionary

trailing s

trailing s noun: the s character, with a looser descending open form than the short s.

Noun

trailing s (plural trailing s's)

  1. The s character, with a looser descending open form than the short s.
    • Trailing s, a narrow, elongated round s that dips below the baseline, appears at the end of words.2013, The Medieval Thought Project, Stanford University, “The Straight s, Its Round cousin, and Its Ligatures”, in Bartholomew the Englishman On the Asp, archived from the original on 17 Dec 2025
    • To a much greater extent than in Northern Textualis, round s was replaced at the end of words by the so-called trailing s, traced in two strokes instead of three or four and occupying less space on the line.2003, Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, page 107

Forms of trailing s

pluraltrailing s's

Questions about trailing s

What does trailing s mean?
Trailing s means the s character, with a looser descending open form than the short s.
What part of speech is trailing s?
Trailing s is a noun.
What is the plural of trailing s?
The plural of trailing s is trailing s's.

Words near trailing s in the dictionary

  1. trailing commissions
  2. trailing edge
  3. trailing edges
  4. trailing off
  5. trailing points
  6. trailing s
  7. trailing spoke
  8. trailing spokes
  9. trailing spring
  10. trailing springs
  11. trailing truck

Source and license

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