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Shcha

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Shcha or Shta (Щ, щ) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the consonant /ɕʨ/ or, more often, /ɕː/ in Russian, /ʃʧ/ in Rusyn and Ukrainian, and the consonant cluster /ʃt/ in Bulgarian. Originally, this letter was a ligature of sha and te (Ш + Т = Щ), with the descender in the middle of the sha, and is descended from the Glagolitic letter Shta: .

This letter is the most troublesome for romanization. In linguistics, its Russian pronunciation is usually transliterated as šč (with háčeks), and pronounced as in the phrase "fresh cheese," although in colloquial speech it is sometimes pronounced as "sh." In English, it is typically transcribed shch, but in German it requires seven letters: schtsch. This gave rise to a popular joke about Catherine the Great, a Russian tsarina of German origin, that she managed to make eight spelling mistakes in the two-letter word Щи (shchi, "cabbage soup"), since the word in German is rendered schtschi.

Letter Ŝ is used in Table A of 1995 (standard of transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters) for letter Щ. Ş is a rarely used single-letter alternative.

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