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Z (or z) is the 26th and last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual names in English are ''zed'' () 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 Y and Z from Greek), 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 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, and Spanish, in 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, 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 .

Under the NATO spelling alphabet, the letter is signified with ''ZULU'', like the Zulu people.

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 (), 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 borrowed from the Greek Zeta, most likely to represent the sound /t͡s/. At c. 300 BC, Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor, removed the letter Z from the alphabet, allegedly due to his distaste for the letter, in that it "looked like the tongue of a corpse". A more likely explanation is the sound had disappeared from Latin, making the letter useless for spelling Latin words. It is also thought due to rhotacism, Z became a trilled R sound, / r/. Whatever the case may be, Appius Claudius' distaste for the letter Z is today credited as the reason for its removal. A few centuries later, after the Roman Conquest of Greece, Z was again borrowed to spell words from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek.

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". 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

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