Ș

Ș (Latin Capital Letter S With Comma Below, U+0218) is an essential character primarily used in the Romanian alphabet, where it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative sound, akin to the 'sh' in the English word 'shoe.' Visually, it features an uppercase Latin 'S' with a distinct comma-shaped diacritic positioned directly below its baseline. While historically, some Romanian texts or older fonts might have used S-cedilla (Ş) due to practical limitations, the official standard, as adopted by the Romanian Academy, mandates the use of S-comma-below as the correct and phonetically accurate representation for this sound. This distinction is crucial for correct typography and pronunciation in Romanian. Its lowercase counterpart is ș (U+0219), and both forms are vital for accurate written Romanian.