Z


Z or z is the 26th and final letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its usual names in English are zed and zee, with an occasional archaic variant izzard.

Name and pronunciation

In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the letter's name is zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta, but in American English its name is zee, analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc., and deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form.
Another English dialectal form is izzard. This dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta, perhaps a Vulgar Latin form with a prosthetic vowel. Its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese.
Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: zeta in Italian, Basque, Spanish, and Icelandic, zê in Portuguese, zäta in Swedish, zæt in Danish, zet in Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, and Czech, Zett in German, zett in Norwegian, zède in French, zetto in Japanese romaji, and zét in Vietnamese. Several languages render it as or, e.g. zeta or in Finnish. In Standard Chinese pinyin, the name of the letter Z is pronounced, as in "zi", although the English zed and zee have become very common. In Esperanto, the name of the letter Z is pronounced.

History

Semitic

The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin, which meant "weapon" or "sword". It represented either the sound as in English and French, or possibly more like .

Greek

The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician Zayin, 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 and theta.
In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the letter seems to have represented ; in Attic, from the 4th century BC onwards, it seems to have stood for and – there is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, such as Elean and Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and voiceless th. In the common dialect that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became, as it remains in modern Greek.

Etruscan

The Etruscan letter Z was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, most probably through the Greek alphabet used on the island of Ischia. In Etruscan, this letter may have represented.

Latin

The letter z was part of the earliest form of the Latin alphabet, adopted from Etruscan. Because the sound in Latin changed to by rhotacism in the fifth century BC, z was dropped and its place given to the new letter g. In the 1st century BC, z was reintroduced at the end of the Latin alphabet to represent the sound of the Greek zeta, as the letter y was introduced to represent the sound of the Greek upsilon.
Before the reintroduction of z, the sound of zeta was written s at the beginning of words and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη "belt" and trapessita for τραπεζίτης "banker".
In some inscriptions, z represented a Vulgar Latin sound, likely an affricate, formed by the merging of the reflexes of Classical Latin, and : for example, zanuariu for ianuariu "January", ziaconus for diaconus "deacon", and oze for hodie "today". Likewise, sometimes replaced in words like baptidiare for baptizare "to baptize". In modern Italian, z represents or, whereas the reflexes of ianuarius and hodie are written with the letter g : gennaio, oggi. In other languages, such as Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred.

Old 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, which developed to Modern French. 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", from Vulgar Latin ad satis.

Last letter of the alphabet

In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to Z being followed by & when her character Jacob Storey says, "He thought it had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."
Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on the end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö, while it is Å for Danish and Norwegian. In the German alphabet, the umlauts and the letter ß are regarded respectively as modifications of the vowels a/o/u and as a variant spelling of ss, not as independent letters, so they come after the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with z.

Variant and derived forms

A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z". In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Ligated with long s, it is part of the origin of the Eszett in the German alphabet. The character ezh resembles a tailed z, as does the yogh, with which it came to be indistinguishable in Middle English writing.
Unicode assigns codepoints and in the Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively.
There is also a variant with a stroke.

Pronunciation and use

English

In modern English orthography, the letter usually represents the sound.
It represents in words like . More often, this sound appears as or in words such as measure, decision, etc. In all these words, developed from earlier by yod-coalescence.
Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin with, though it occurs in words beginning with other letters. It is the least frequently used letter in written English, with a frequency of about 0.08% in words.
is more common in the Oxford spelling of British English than in standard British English, as this variant prefers the more etymologically 'correct' -ize endings, which are closer to Greek, to -ise endings, which are closer to French; however, -yse is preferred over -yze in Oxford spelling, as it is closer to the original Greek roots of words like analyse. The most common variety of English it is used in is American English, which prefers both the -ize and -yze endings. One native Germanic English word that contains 'z', freeze came to be spelled that way by convention, even though it could have been spelled with 's'.
is used in writing to represent the act of sleeping. It is used because closed-mouth human snoring often sounds like the pronunciation of this letter.

Other languages

stands for a voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant, in Albanian, Breton, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It stands for in Chinese pinyin, Finnish, and German, and is likewise expressed in Old Norse. In Italian, it represents two phonemes, and. In Portuguese, it stands for in most cases, but also for or at the end of syllables. In Basque, it represents the sound.
Castilian Spanish uses the letter to represent , though in other dialects this sound has merged with. Before voiced consonants, the sound is voiced to or, sometimes debbucalized to . This is the only context in which can represent a voiced sibilant in Spanish, though also represents in this environment.
In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, usually stands for the sound /s/ and thus shares the value of ; it normally occurs only in loanwords that are spelt with in the source languages.
The letter on its own represents in Polish. It is also used in four of the seven officially recognized digraphs: , , and , and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language. can also appear with diacritical marks, namely and, which are used to represent the sounds and. They also appear in the digraphs and .
Hungarian uses in the digraphs , and .
In Modern Scots is used in place of the obsolete letter and should be pronounced as a hard 'g'. Whilst there are a few common nouns which use in this manner, such as brulzie, z as a yogh substitute is more common in people's names and place-names. Often the names are mispronounced to follow the apparent English spelling so Mackenzie is commonly pronounced with a 'z' sound. Menzies, however, still retains the correct pronunciation of 'Mingus'.
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, usually stands for, such as in Azerbaijani, Igbo, Indonesian, Shona, Swahili, Tatar, Turkish, and Zulu. represents in Northern Sami and Inari Sami. In Turkmen, represents.
In the Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn romanisations of Japanese, stands for a phoneme whose allophones include and.

Other systems

A graphical variant of is, which has been adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative.

Other uses

In mathematics, is used to denote the set of integers. Originally, ℤ was just a handwritten version of the bold capital Z used in printing but, over time, it has come to be used more frequently in printed works too.
In chemistry, the letter Z is used to denote the Atomic number of an element, such as Z=3 for Lithium.
The Z boson is a particle in nuclear physics.

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

On German typewriter- and computer keyboards, the positions of the letters Z and Y are swapped.

Other representations