strokes in Younger Futhark. Long s 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. It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule "round" or "short" s, which was at the time only used at the end of words. 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. In Spain, the change was mainly accomplished between 1760 and 1766. In France, the change occurred between 1782 and 1793. Printers in the United States stopped using the long s between 1795 and 1810. In English orthography, the London printer John Bell (1745–1831) pioneered the change. His edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he "ventured to depart from the common mode by rejecting the long 'ſ' in favor of the round one, as being less liable to error....." The Times of London made the switch from the long to the short s with its issue of 10 September 1803. Encyclopædia Britannica's 5th edition, completed in 1817, was the last edition to use the long s. In German orthography, long s was retained in Fraktur (Schwabacher) type as well as in standard cursive (Sütterlin) well into the 20th century, and was officially abolished in 1941. The ligature of ſs (or ſz) was retained, however, giving rise to the Eszett , in contemporary German orthography. Use in writing systems The letter is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant after and . It is the most common letter for the first letter of a word in the English language. In English and several other languages, primarily Western Romance ones like Spanish and French, final is the usual mark of plural nouns. It is the regular ending of English third person present tense verbs. represents the voiceless alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant in most languages as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It also commonly represents the voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant , as in Portuguese mesa (table) or English 'rose' and 'bands', or it may represent the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative , as in most Portuguese