Printers in the United States stopped using the long s between 17. In France, the change occurred between 17. In Spain, the change was mainly accomplished between the years 17. In most western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century. It existed alongside minuscule "round" or "short" s, which was at the time only used at the end of words. It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. The minuscule form ſ, called the long s, developed in the early medieval period, within the Visigothic and Carolingian hands, with predecessors in the half-uncial and cursive scripts of Late Antiquity. The Italic letter was also adopted into Elder Futhark, as Sowilō ( ᛊ), and appears with four to eight strokes in the earliest runic inscriptions, but is occasionally reduced to three strokes ( ᛋ) from the later 5th century, and appears regularly with three strokes in Younger Futhark. In other Italic alphabets (Venetic, Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy in Western Greek alphabets, and the three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet.
The shape of Latin S arises from Greek Σ by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The early Latin alphabet adopted sigma, but not san, as Old Latin did not have a /ʃ/ phoneme. Represented a separate phoneme, most likely /ʃ/ (transliterated as ś). In Etruscan, the value /s/ of Greek sigma (?) was maintained, while san (?) The Western Greek alphabet used in Cumae was adopted by the Etruscans and Latins in the 7th century BC, over the following centuries developing into a range of Old Italic alphabets including the Etruscan alphabet and the early Latin alphabet.
Herodotus reports that "San" was the name given by the Dorians to the same letter called "Sigma" by the Ionians. The original name of the letter "sigma" may have been san, but due to the complicated early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets, "san" came to be identified as a separate letter, Ϻ. Within Greek, the name of sigma was influenced by its association with the Greek word σίζω (earlier *sigj-) "to hiss". While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician šîn, its name sigma is taken from the letter samekh, while the shape and position of samekh but name of šîn is continued in the xi. Īncient Greek did not have a /ʃ/ phoneme, so the derived Greek letter sigma (Σ) came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/. It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth ( שנא) and represented the phoneme /ʃ/ via the acrophonic principle. Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in ' ship'). Further information: Shin (letter), Sigma, San (letter), and Sho (letter)