How to type Sharp S (Eszett)
To type Sharp S (Eszett) (ß), press Alt + 0223 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + S on Mac, or write ß in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00DF directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00df on Linux, or 00df then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter Sharp S
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00DF
- Windows
- Alt + 0223
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0223 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + S | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ß | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00DF | LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S |
Other accents symbols
ß lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
How to type ß on a Mac and on a phone
On a Mac, press Option + S. Character Viewer, on Control + Command + Space, finds it under Latin Small Letter Sharp S if the shortcut is taken by something else.
On a phone, neither iOS nor Android has a codepoint route. Copy ß from this page once, then add it as a text replacement (Settings, General, Keyboard on iOS) so a short abbreviation expands to it from then on.
What ß gets confused with
Unicode's own confusables table, the one used to catch lookalike domain names, groups ß with β (U+03B2, Beta) and ϐ (U+03D0, Greek Beta Symbol). They are separate characters that render close enough to be mistaken for one another, so a search or a string comparison will separate them where your eye will not. If Sharp S (Eszett) is not matching where you expect it to, one of these is the usual reason.
What Unicode says about Sharp S (Eszett)
Unicode annotates ß directly. Against U+00DF the code chart carries the note “German”. It adds: not used in Swiss High German; uppercase is "SS" (standard case mapping), alternatively 1E9E. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from ß to Beta, latin small letter long s (U+017F), latin small letter ezh (U+0292), latin capital letter sharp s (U+1E9E), latin small letter beta (U+A7B5) and latin small letter middle scots s (U+A7D7). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Sharp S (Eszett) looks nearly right but not quite.
How Sharp S (Eszett) behaves in software
ß is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
What people ask about Sharp S (Eszett)
How to write eszett on keyboard?
You can press Alt + 0223 on Windows, with Num Lock on and the digits typed on the numeric keypad, or press Option + S on Mac. Either produces ß.
How to type eszett on mac?
On Mac, press Option + S to type ß. The Character Viewer, Control+Command+Space, finds it by name as well.
Every way to write Sharp S (Eszett)
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00DF |
| Decimal | 223 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 9F |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 DF |
| HTML entity | ß |
| HTML numeric | ß or ß |
| CSS | \00DF |
| JavaScript | \u00DF |
| Python | \u00DF |
| URL-encoded | %C3%9F |
| SVG | 00DF.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ß arrives as ß
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 9F are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00DF.