Z, or z, is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Its usual names in English are zed (pronounced ) and zee , with an occasional archaic variant izzard ."
Z", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "zee", op.
cit.
Name and pronunciation
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed X, Y, and Z from Greek, along with their names), 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.One early use of "zee":
Another English dialectal form is izzard .
This dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan  or the French , 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:  in Italian, Basque, Spanish, and Icelandic (no longer part of its alphabet but found in personal names),  in Portuguese,  in Swedish,  in Danish,  in Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, and Czech,  in German (capitalised as a noun),  in Norwegian,  in French,  in Japanese romaji, and  in Vietnamese.
Several languages render it as  or , e.g.   or more rarely  in Finnish (sometimes dropping the first t altogether; , or  the latter of which is not very commonplace).
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  (as in Italian , ).
Greek
The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician Zayin (15px|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 (η) and theta (θ).
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 (IPA  and , respectively).
In the common dialect (koine) 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 .James Grout: Appius Claudius Caecus and the Letter Z, part of the
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  for  "belt" and  for  "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,  for  "January",  for  "deacon", and  for  "today".Ti Alkire & Carol Rosen, Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61.
Likewise,  sometimes replaced  in words like  for  "to baptize".
In modern Italian, z represents  or , whereas the reflexes of  and  are written with the letter g (representing  when before i and e): , .
In other languages, such as Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred.
Old English
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 seen in the doublet forms jealous and zealous.
Both of these come from a late Latin , derived from the imported Greek  .
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  "enough" (Modern French ), from Vulgar Latin  ("to sufficiency").
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 [Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."
George Eliot: Adam Bede.
Chapter XXI.
online at Project Gutenberg
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 (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü) and the letter ß (Eszett or scharfes S) are regarded respectively as modifications of the vowels a/o/u and as a (standardized) 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" (German , also ).
In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures.
Ligated with long s (ſ), it is part of the origin of the Eszett (ß) in the German alphabet.
The character ezh (Ʒ) resembles a tailed z, as does the yogh (ȝ), 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.
Image:Z-small-VA-64x88.svg|lowercase cursive z Image:Z-small-Variante.svg|z in a sans serif typeface
There is also a variant with a stroke.
Pronunciation and use
Pronunciations of Zz
English
In modern English orthography, the letter  usually represents the sound .
It represents  in words like seizure.
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 (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 and chosen).
is used in writing to represent the act of sleeping (sometimes using multiple z's like zzzz).
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 (occurs in loanwords only), 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  (depending on the regional variant) at the end of syllables.
In Basque, it represents the sound .
Castilian Spanish uses the letter to represent  (as English  in thing), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with .
Before voiced consonants, the sound is voiced to  or , sometimes debbucalized to  (as in the surname Guzmán ,  or ).
This is the only context in which  can represent a voiced sibilant  in Spanish, though  also represents  (or , depending on the dialect) 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:  (),  ( or ),  ( or , sometimes it represents a sequence ) and  (), and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language.
(Other Slavic languages avoid digraphs and mark the corresponding phonemes with the  (caron) diacritic: , , , ; this system has its origin in Czech orthography of the Hussite period.)  can also appear with diacritical marks, namely  and , which are used to represent the sounds  and .
They also appear in the digraphs  ( or ) and  ( or ).
Hungarian uses  in the digraphs  (expressing , as opposed to the value of , which is ), and  (expressing ).
In Modern Scots  is used in place of the obsolete letter  (yogh) and should be pronounced as a hard 'g'.
Whilst there are a few common nouns which use  in this manner, such as  (pronounced 'brulgey' meaning broil), 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 Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki, and Hepburn romanisations of Japanese,  stands for a phoneme whose allophones include  and .
Additionally, in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki systems,  is used to represent that same phoneme before , where it's pronounced .
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, \mathbb{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 (number of protons), such as Z=3 for Lithium.
In electrical engineering, Z is used to denote electrical impedance.
The Z boson is a particle in nuclear physics.
Related characters
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
Z with diacritics: Ź ź Ẑ ẑ Ž ž Ż ż Ẓ ẓ Ẕ ẕ Ƶ ƶ ᵶ Ᶎ ᶎ Ⱬ ⱬ
ß : German letter regarded as a ligature of long s (ſ) and short s, called  or .
(In some typefaces and handwriting styles it is rather a ligature of long s and tailed z (ſʒ).)
Ȥ ȥ: Latin letter z with a hook, intended for the transcription of Middle High German, for instances of the letter z with a sound value of /s/.
Ɀ ɀ : Latin letter Z with swash tail
Ʒ ʒ : Latin letter ezh
Ꝣ ꝣ : Visigothic Z
Ᶎ ᶎ : Z with hook, used for writing Mandarin Chinese using the early draft version of pinyin romanization during the mid-1950s
IPA-specific symbols related to Z:
is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
Modifier letters ᶻ ᶼ ᶽ are used in phonetic transcription
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets
𐤆 : Semitic letter Zayin, from which the following letters derive
Ζ ζ : Greek letter Zeta, from which the following letters derive
: Coptic letter Zēta
𐌆 : Old Italic Z, which is the ancestor of modern Latin Z
: Gothic letter ezec
З з : Cyrillic letter Ze
Computing codes
1
On German typewriter- and computer keyboards (in comparison to those used in the UK/US), the positions of the letters Z and Y are swapped.
(In German, Y is only used in loanwords and names.)
Other representations
See also
Zed
Zee
Z flag
References
External links
