ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll
Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx
Yy	Zz

Z (named zed /ˈzɛd/ or zee /ˈziː/)^[1] is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Name and pronunciation [link]

In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed /ˈzɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta, but in American English, its name is zee /ˈziː/, deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form.^[2]

Another English dialectal form is izzard /ˈɪzərd/. It dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta,^[1] perhaps a popular form with a prosthetic vowel.

Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: zeta in Italian, Spanish and Icelandic, zäta in Swedish, zet in Dutch, Polish, Romanian and Czech, zæt in Danish, zett in Norwegian and German, zède in French, and zê in Portuguese.

Several languages lacking the /z/ phoneme render it as /ts/, e.g. zeta /tsetɑ/ or /tset/ in Finnish. In Mandarin Chinese pinyin the name of the letter Z is pronounced [tsɨ], although the English zed and zee have become very common.

History [link]

Phoenician zayin	Etruscan Z	Greek zeta

Semitic [link]

The name of the Semitic symbol was zayin which was the seventh letter and possibly meant "weapon". It represented either z as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).

Greek [link]

The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician symbol I, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it zeta, a new name made in imitation of eta (η) and theta (θ).

In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the letter seems to have represented /dz/; in Attic, from the 4th century BC onwards, it seems to have been either /zd/ or a /dz/, and in fact there is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, as Elean and Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and unvoiced th (IPA /ð/ and /θ/, respectively). In the common dialect (κοινη) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became /z/, as it remains in modern Greek.

Etruscan [link]

In Etruscan, Z may have represented /ts/.

Latin [link]

In Old Latin, the consonant /z/ (written s) developed into /r/ by rhotacism and a symbol for /z/ became useless. It was therefore removed from the alphabet around 300 BC by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus, and a new letter, G, was put in its place soon thereafter.

In the 1st century BC, Z was introduced again at the end of the Latin alphabet to accurately represent the sound of the Greek zeta. The letter Z appeared only in Greek words, and is the only letter besides Y that the Romans took directly from Greek, rather than from Etruscan.

Earlier zeta was transliterated as s at the beginning and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη "belt" and trapessita for τραπεζίτης "banker".

In Vulgar Latin, Greek zeta seems to have represented (IPA /dj/), and later (IPA /dz/); d replaced /z/ in words like baptidiare for baptizare "baptize", while conversely Z appears for /di/ in forms like zaconus, zabulus, for diaconus "deacon", diabulus, "devil". Z was also written for the consonant J, which changed from an approximant in Latin to a fricative in the Romance languages, as in zunior for junior "younger".

Last letter of the alphabet [link]

In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. [1] In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to Z being followed by & when she makes Jacob Storey say, "He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."^[3]

Blackletter Z [link]

A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z" (German geschwänztes Z, also Z mit Unterschlinge). In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Together with long s (ſ), it is the origin of the ß ligature in the German alphabet.

Z in an Antiqua typeface may be identical with the character representing 3 in other fonts.

A graphical variant of tailed Z is Ezh, as adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative. Tailed Z is to be distinguished from the similar insular G and yogh found in Old English, Irish, Middle English, etc.

Unicode assigns codepoints U+2128 ℨ black-letter capital z (HTML: ℨ) and U+1D537 𝔷 fraktur small z (HTML: 𝔷) in the Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively.

• 

  lowercase cursive z

• 

  z in a sans serif typeface

Use in English [link]

Early English used S alone for both the unvoiced and the voiced sibilant. The Latin sound imported through French was new and was not written with Z but with G or I. The successive changes can be well seen in the double forms from the same original, jealous and zealous. Both of these come from a late Latin zelosus, derived from the imported Greek ζῆλος zêlos. The earlier form is jealous; its initial sound is the [dʒ] which developed to Modern French [ʒ]. John Wycliffe wrote the word as gelows or ielous.

Z at the end of a word was pronounced ts, as in English assets, from Old French asez "enough" (Modern French assez), from Vulgar Latin ad satis ("to sufficiency").^[4]

Z represents /ʒ/ in words like azure, seizure. More often, this sound appears as su or si in words such as measure, decision, etc. In all these words, /ʒ/ developed from earlier /zj/ by yod-coalescence.

Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin with Z, though it occurs in words beginning with other letters. It is the most rarely used letter in written English.^[5] It is more common in American English than in British English, as with the endings -ize/-ise and -ization/-isation, where the American spelling is derived from Greek and the British from French. One native Germanic English word that contains z, freeze (past froze, participle frozen) came to be spelled that way by convention, even though it could have been spelled with s (as with choose, chose, chosen).

Zzz or zzzz is used in writing to represent the act of sleeping. It is used because human snoring often sounds like the pronunciation of the letter.

Use in other languages [link]

Z stands for /z/ in Albanian, Breton, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It stands for /ts/ in Chinese pinyin, Danish, Finnish, and German. In Italian, it represents two phonemes, /ts/ and /dz/. Castilian Spanish uses the letter to represent /θ/ (as English th in thing), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with /s/. In Portuguese, it stands for /z/ in most cases, but also for /s/ or /ʃ/ (depending on the regional variant) at the end of syllables.

The letter Z on its own represents /z/ in the Polish language. It is also used in four of the seven officially recognized digraphs: cz (/t​͡ʂ/), dz (/d​͡z/ or /t​͡s/), rz (/ʐ/ or /ʂ/) and sz (/ʂ/); and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language. (Other Slavic languages avoid digraphs and mark the corresponding phonemes with the háček (caron) accent: č, ď, ř, š; this system has its origin in Czech orthography of the Hussite period.) Two more Polish digraphs include Z with diacritical marks: dź (/d​͡ʑ/ or /t​͡ɕ/) and dż (/d​͡ʐ/ or /t​͡ʂ/).

Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, z usually stands for [z], such as in Azerbaijani, Igbo, Indonesian, Shona, Swahili, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, and Zulu.

In the Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn romanisations of Japanese, ⟨z⟩ stands for a phoneme whose allophones include [z] and [dz].

In mathematics, U+2124 ℤ double-struck capital z is used to denote the set of integers.

Related letters and other similar characters [link]

• Ζ ζ : Greek letter Zeta

U+0369 ͩ greek capital letter zeta (HTML: ͩ), U+03B6 ζ greek small letter zeta (HTML: ζ ζ)

• З з : Cyrillic letter Ze
• Ʒ ʒ : Latin letter Ezh
• Ᵹ ᵹ : Insular G
• Ȝ ȝ : Yogh

Computing codes [link]

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations [link]

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Zulu	––··

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

Zh [link]

Zh is used in English to transliterate the Cyrillic letter Ж, for instance in the surnames of Leonid Brezhnev and Marshal Zhukov.

In English-transliterated Tamil script, zh is used to represent ழ U+0BB4 (ḻ, [ɹ]).

See also [link]

• Zed
• Zee
• Zzz

References [link]

External links [link]

• Media related to Z at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for Z
• The Wiktionary entry for z
• James Grout: Appius Claudius Caecus and the Letter Z, part of the Encyclopædia Romana