S

S is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents /s/. Historically it is from Phoenician shin ('tooth') by way of Greek sigma. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter S the digit 1; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

The Latin S's sound history, descended from a Phoenician sign for a sharp sibilant by way of Greek sigma, is covered elsewhere in this atlas. Graphically, classical Athenian Greek wrote sigma as an angular zigzag in its monumental capital form, close to a stretched-out Z, though a rounder lunate form, resembling a C, was also common in later Greek and Byzantine writing.

The Etruscan and Roman letter descended from the angular tradition but rounded its strokes over centuries of cursive handwriting, producing by the classical Roman period the smooth double-curve S still used today; the shift from angular to curved is one of the more visually dramatic transformations any Latin letter underwent on its way from a Greek monumental inscription to a Roman one. The lowercase s is essentially the same double curve at a smaller scale, one of the few Latin letters whose upper and lower case remain almost identical in outline. S has no Roman numeral value of its own, though the abbreviation for the old British currency unit shilling, and the dollar sign some scholars trace to a crossed S derived from the Spanish peso mark, are later, unrelated uses of the letter's shape rather than part of the alphabet's own numeral or gematria history.