Z
Z, or z, is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the Latin alphabet. It is used in the modern English alphabet, in the alphabets of other Western European languages, and in others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed, which is most commonly used in British English, and zee, most commonly used in American English, with an occasional archaic variant izzard.
Name
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek letter 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. Outside of the anglosphere, 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, and Spanish, seta in 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, and giét in Vietnamese. Several languages render it as or, e.g. tseta or more rarely tset 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 existed in more archaic versions of Latin, but at, Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor, removed the letter Z from the alphabet, because the appearance while pronouncing it imitated a grinning skull. A more likely explanation is that the sound that it probably represented had disappeared from Latin after turning into due to a rhotacism process, making the letter useless for spelling Latin words. Whatever the case may be, Appius Claudius's 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 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 seen in the doublet forms 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.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. The German alphabet ends with Z, as 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.
Typographic variants
The variant with a stroke and the lower-case tailed Z, though distinct characters, can also be considered to be allographs of /.Tailed Z originated in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces. 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 came to be indistinguishable from the yogh in Middle English writing, leading to the apparently anomalous pronunciation of the surname Menzies.
Unicode assigns codepoints and in the Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively.
Use in writing systems
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 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, 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, and Slovak. It stands for in Chinese pinyin and Jyutping, 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 one of the most frequently used of the consonant letters 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 . The letter on its own represents.
In Modern Scots, usually represents, but is also used in place of the obsolete letter , which represents and. Whilst there are a few common nouns which use in this manner, such as brulzie, as a yogh substitute is more common in people's names and placenames. Often the names are pronounced to follow the apparent English spelling, so Mackenzie is commonly pronounced with. Menzies, however, retains the 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.
In the Jyutping romanization of Cantonese, represents. Other romanizations use either,, or.