U+0218 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW

U+0218 was added to Unicode in version 3.0. It belongs to the block Latin Extended-B in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Uppercase Letter and is mainly used in the Latin script. It is related to its lowercase variant 0219.

The glyph is a Canonical composition of the glyphs 0053 0326. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. In text U+0218 behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Upper for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the Romanian language sound /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe).

This letter however was not part of the early Unicode versions, and not in the predecessors like ISO/IEC_8859-2 and Windows-1250, which is why Ş (S-cedilla) is often used in digital texts in Romanian. S-cedilla was introduced for computers for the sake of the Turkish language, and later it was used unchanged also for the Romanian language. It was less of a problem then, since the screens and printouts had less resolution and newspapers and books would use a suitable font anyway.

S-comma was introduced only in Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian national standardization body, but most computers today still do not have fonts compatible with it (computers with Microsoft operating systems older than Windows XP do not have compatible fonts. Windows XP does not support this letter out of the box, but it is possible to install European Union Expansion Font Update which add support for this letter). That is why almost all Romanian texts still use S-cedilla (or even S), despite the recommendation to migrate from cedilla to comma.

The letter is placed in Unicode in the Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", as the "capital letter S with comma" (U+0218) and "small letter s with comma" (U+0219). In HTML these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

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 /ʃ/ and ț for /ts/.