S-comma

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound , the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like "sh" in "shoe").
History.
The letter was proposed in the "Buda Lexicon", a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, "Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi" and "Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române", introducing ș for and ț for .
Unicode support.
S-comma was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250. Instead, Ş (S-cedilla), a character available since Unicode 1.1.0 (1993), was used for digital texts written in Romanian. In some contexts, like with low-resolution screens and printouts, the visual distinction between "ș" and "ş" is minimal. In 1999, at the request of the , S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Microsoft Windows XP, but a later European Union Expansion Font Update provided the feature. While digital accessibility to S-comma has since improved, both characters continue to be used interchangeably in various contexts like publishing.
The letter is part of Unicode's Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", titled as "Latin capital letter S with comma below" (U+0218) and "Latin small letter s with comma below" (U+0219). In HTML, these can be encoded by codice_1 and codice_2, respectively.