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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 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 or .

''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 /nowiki> 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 (''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, which came to be indistinguishable from the yogh (ȝ) 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

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 or end with , though it occurs within other words. 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 (often using multiple z's, like ''zzzz''), as an onomatopoeia for the sound of closed-mouth human snoring.

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 and Jyutping, 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 ). The letter on its own represents .

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, $\mathbb$ 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.

In astronomy, z is a dimensionless quantity representing redshift.

The Z boson is a particle in nuclear physics.

Z has been used as a military symbol by Russian forces during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian civilians have used it in support of their government.

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 the QWERTZ keyboard used in Central Europe the Z replaces the Y of the standard US/UK QWERTY keyboard as the sixth letter of the first row.

Other representations

See also

* Bourbaki dangerous bend symbol,
* Z with stroke, Ƶ
* Zed
* Zee
* Z flag
* Z (military symbol)

References

External links

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{{Latin script, Z}

ISO basic Latin letters