The letter S in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 2, 3 and 4. s leaves the top-left empty, which is unusual and makes it easier to spot than its dot count suggests.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and S is part of the family that starts with i. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. This family is worth knowing for what the third step produces: not a letter at all, but the “the” contraction. All twenty-six letters are laid out family by family.

The alphabet runs out before this family does. There are only 26 letters, and the shapes in this part of the cell space went to the words English uses most instead — which is why i plus dots 3 and 6 gives you a whole word rather than a letter. The contraction reference shows the other cells that were assigned this way.

Where S turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, S is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “so”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary s. That is the rule beginners trip on most: so is a single cell, but the s in a word like “see” is just a letter.

A contraction is one cell doing the work of two or more letters, which is why a Grade 2 page is roughly a quarter shorter than the same text in Grade 1. The complete Grade 2 reference lists all of them with the position rules that govern when they may be used.

Writing a capital S

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital S is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from S by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with S, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.