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German had no single spelling until a dictionary set one. In 1880 Konrad Duden published his Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache with about 27,000 words, following the new Prussian and Bavarian school rules; after the Second Orthographic Conference of 1901 it became the reference for the spelling agreed there. The umlaut dots also have a history in writing: scribes once marked a changed vowel with an e after it, printers shrank that e and set it above the letter, and the small e became two dots. That is why ae, oe and ue are still the official stand-ins for ä, ö and ü. The last large change was the reform of 1996, signed in Vienna on 1 July 1996 by Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, binding in schools and offices from 1 August 1998 and revised from 1 August 2006. Most of the words it changed fall under one rule: ß now follows only a long vowel or a diphthong, so daß became dass and Fluß became Fluss, while Fuß kept its ß. Three equal consonants also stopped merging, so Schiffahrt became Schifffahrt. Since 2004 the Council for German Orthography, with members from several German-speaking countries, has kept the rules; it made the capital ẞ an option on 29 June 2017. The 29th Duden, published in 2024, lists about 151,000 headwords, around 3,000 of them new, among them Balkonkraftwerk, matchen and Triggerwarnung.
ß is the only German letter that went without a capital for most of its life. It began as a ligature of long s and a tailed z in blackletter type, which is why its name, Eszett, joins the letter names Es and Zett; it is also called scharfes S, sharp s. It is not decoration: reißen (to tear) and reisen (to travel), or Buße (penance) and Busse (buses), are told apart by it alone. A capital was first proposed in 1879 but only reached Unicode in April 2008, as U+1E9E ẞ in version 5.1. The 2017 rules still said to write SS in capitals and allowed ẞ beside it, as in STRASSE or STRAẞE; the 2024 wording names ẞ first and SS as the other option. Software has not caught up: the Unicode uppercase of ß is still SS, so many programs turn Straße into STRASSE on their own. Switzerland and Liechtenstein stopped using ß in the 20th century and write Strasse, gross and Fussball.
German keyboards are QWERTZ, not QWERTY. Y and Z swap places because Z is far more frequent in German, while Y appears mostly in loanwords and names; T and Z often stand side by side, as in -tz, and sit on different hands, and zu, a very common word and prefix, is an easy roll. The national standard is DIN 2137, first published in 1976. Its 2012 edition defined the layouts T1, T2 and T3, and T2 was the first to include the capital ẞ; T3 was never produced commercially. The 2018 revision replaced T2 and T3 with E1 and E2, E2 being for US-shaped hardware. On the standard Windows layout ü sits to the right of P, ö and ä to the right of L, and ß to the right of 0, with ? on Shift and the backslash on AltGr. The key left of 1 is a dead key for ^, and the key left of Backspace one for ´ and `. AltGr gives @ on Q, € on E, µ on M, { [ ] } on 7, 8, 9 and 0, ~ on the plus key and | on the < key. For the capital ẞ, many Windows setups accept Shift+AltGr+ß, and Alt with 7838 on the number pad works too; on a Mac, Caps Lock and then ß gives ẞ. The Swiss German layout has no ß key at all. When umlauts are missing, the rules say write ae, oe, ue and ss. Passports do the same in the machine-readable lines: Müller becomes MUELLER and Gößmann GOESSMANN. .de domain names have taken ä, ö and ü since 1 March 2004, and ß since 16 November 2010. This page shows all 30 letters, with ẞ, „ “ and € in the Special popup.
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