Long s
The long or medial s (ſ) is a form of the minuscule letter s that was formerly used when the s occurred within or at the beginning of the word, for example ſinfulneſs ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.
The medial s was subject to confusion with the minuscule f, sometimes even having an f-like nub appended to its middle. The practice later died out in Roman and Italic type-faces by the end of the 19th century. It survived longer in the German Fraktur; the modern German letter ß (ess-tsett) is a ligature representing either ſz or ſs (see ß for the dispute). One may note that Greek also features a normal sigma 'σ ' and a special terminal form 'ς', which may have supported the idea of distinct 's' forms; in medieval Europe a significant percentage of the literate class would have been familiar with Greek.
The medial s is represented in Unicode by the hexadecimal value 17F, and may be represented in HTML as ſ.
The confusion between the medial s and f has been the subject of some intentional humour, much of it involving phrases like "sucking pig", and forms the basis of Benny Hill's song "Fad-Eyed Fal" (i.e., Sad-Eyed Sal).
