Letter 19 of 26
The letter S in braille
S is dots 2, 3 and 4.
Dots 2-3-4
Unicode ⠎ — U+280E
How to recognise it
Dots 2, 3 and 4. s leaves dot 1 empty, one of five letters that do: i, j, s, t and w.
I, S and the “the” sign
S is I with dot 3 added; add dot 6 as well and the cell is the “the” sign, ⠮, rather than a letter.
Adding dots 3 and 6 turns a, b, c, d and e into u, v, x, y and z. For f, g, h, i and j the same step gives the words and, for, of, the and with — so i plus dots 3 and 6 is “the”, not a letter. The contraction reference lists all five.
Where S turns up in Grade 2
Standing alone, S is the word “so”. Inside a word it is the letter again: “see” is ⠎⠑⠑.
| Cell | Letters | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| sh | one cell for the letters “sh”; standing alone it is the word “shall” | |
| st | one cell for the letters “st”; standing alone it is the word “still” | |
| dis | one cell for “dis” at the start of a word | |
| was | the word “was”, standing alone | |
| his | the word “his”, standing alone |
The contraction reference gives the rules for each.
Writing a capital S
Capital S is two cells: the capital sign, dot 6, then S. A word in capitals takes the sign twice, once for the whole word: “SEE” is ⠠⠠⠎⠑⠑. Capitals covers longer runs.
Easily confused with
S differs by a single dot from I, P and T — the letters to drill it against.
Practice words
Words that start with S, one cell per letter in Grade 1. Where Grade 2 writes one shorter, that form follows.
see
some
Grade 2: ⠐⠎ — 2 cells instead of 4
small
In a whole book
In a count over the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the letter s is printed 6,498 times. Grade 2 still writes it as its own cell 3,111 times, 47.9%. The other 3,387 are inside contractions, most often “sh” (793), “said” (460), “st” (391) and “was” (329).
The cell itself is written 3,955 times in the Grade 2 text: 3,111 as the letter, 152 as the word “so”, 577 inside shortforms and 115 as the second cell of a two-cell contraction.
S in braille as an image
