S tier
S tier is the highest rank on a tier list, placed above A tier and reserved for the small number of items considered clearly better than everything else.
The S rank comes from Japanese grading, where a teacher could award an S above the usual A to mark work that was exceptional rather than merely excellent. Japanese video games adopted the same scale for performance grades, and when fighting game communities began publishing character rankings they inherited it. S is variously read as "superior", "super" or "superb"; there is no single official expansion, and the letter matters more than the word behind it.
What belongs in S tier
In practice S tier answers a narrower question than "is this good?" - it asks whether something is good enough to change how you approach the whole subject. In a fighting game that means a character strong enough to warp which matchups people practise. In a food tier list it means the thing you would order every time without reading the rest of the menu. A useful S tier is small: two or three entries out of thirty, not a third of the list.
S tier in practice
In Super Smash Bros. Melee, Fox is the canonical S tier pick - not simply the strongest character but the one whose existence shapes how everyone else is evaluated. Outside games the same logic holds: on a pizza tier list, S tier is the topping you would defend in an argument, not merely one you would eat. On a list of programming languages ranked for a specific job, S tier is the one you would have to be talked out of.
The mistake people make with S tier
The most common mistake is inflation. Once four or five things are in S tier, the rank stops carrying information and the list flattens into "things I like" and "things I do not". If everything you enjoy is landing in S, the fix is to force a comparison between the S entries and demote whichever loses.
S tier questions
- What does S tier stand for?
- There is no single official expansion. S is most often read as "superior", "super" or "superb", and occasionally as the Japanese "shuu" or "sugoi". The convention came from Japanese grading rather than from an English acronym, so the letter is the meaning - it simply denotes a rank above A.
- Is there anything higher than S tier?
- Not in the standard scale, but people extend it when S alone is not enough. SS, S+ and EX all appear as ranks above S, borrowed from Japanese games that used the same escalation. These are informal additions rather than part of the conventional S to F list.