Z is the twenty-sixth and final
letter of the
basic modern Latin alphabet.
Name and pronunciation
In many
dialects of
English, the letter's name is
zed, , reflecting its derivation from the
Greek zeta (see below). In
American English, its name is
zee , deriving from a late
17th century English dialectal form. Another English dialectal form is
izzard , which dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from
Occitan izèda (literally translating as "i zed") or the
French et zède "and z". Other
Indo-European languages pronounce the letter's name in a similar fashion, such as
zet in
Dutch,
German,
Romanian and
Czech,
zède in
French,
zæt in
Danish,
zäta in
Swedish,
zeta in
Italian and in
Spanish, and
zê in
Portuguese.
In
Chinese (Mandarin)
pinyin the name of the letter Z is pronounced [tsɛ], although the English
zed and
zee have become very common.
In the Philippines, it is quite common to hear people pronounce the name of the letter Z as "zay" rhyming with "say".
History
The name of the
Semitic symbol was
zayin, possibly meaning "weapon", and was the seventh letter. It represented either as in English and French, or possibly more like (as in Italian
zeta,
zero).
The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician symbol
I, 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 been either or a , and in fact there is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, as Elean and
Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and unvoiced
th (IPA and , respectively). In the common dialect (κοινη) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became , as it remains in modern Greek.
In
Etruscan,
Z may have symbolized ; in Latin, . In early Latin, the sound of developed into and the symbol became useless. It was therefore removed from the alphabet around 300 BC by the Censor,
Appius Claudius Caecus, and a new letter,
G, was put in its place soon thereafter.
In the 1st century BC, it was, like
Y, introduced again at the end of the Latin alphabet, in order to represent more precisely the value of the Greek
zeta — previously transliterated as
S at the beginning and
ss in the middle of words, eg.
sona = ζωνη, "belt";
trapessita = τραπεζιτης, "banker". The letter appeared only in Greek words, and
Z is the only letter besides
Y that the Romans took directly from the Greek, rather than Etruscan.
In
Vulgar Latin, Greek
Zeta seems to have represented (IPA ), and later (IPA ); d was for in words like
baptidiare for
baptizare "baptize", while conversely
Z appears for in forms like
zaconus,
zabulus, for
diaconus "deacon",
diabulus, "devil".
Z also is often written for the consonantal
I (that is,
J, IPA ) as in
zunior for
junior "younger".
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 she makes Jacob Storey say, "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."
Blackletter Z
A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval
Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern
Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z" (German
geschwänztes Z, also
Z mit Unterschlinge) In some
Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Together with
long s, it is also the origin of the
ß ligature in German orthography.
A graphical variant of tailed Z is
Ezh, as adopted into the
International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the
voiced postalveolar fricative.
Unicode assigns codepoints for "BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL Z" and "FRAKTUR SMALL Z" in the
Letterlike Symbols and
Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges, at U+2128 and U+1D537 , respectively.
Usage
In Italian,
Z represents two phonemes, namely and ; in German, it stands for , though it can be pronounced or even in rapid speech; in Castilian
Spanish it represents (as English
th in
thing), though in other dialects (
Latin American,
Andalusian) this sound has merged with .
In
Chinese (Mandarin)
pinyin "z" is pronounced (unaspirated pinyin "c" - "halfway" between be
ds and be
ts). In romanised
Japanese Z stands for both and (which are
allophones in that language).
The
International Phonetic Alphabet uses for the
voiced alveolar sibilant. Early English had used (and to an extent, still does use)
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 ζηλος. Much the earlier form is
jealous; its initial sound is the which in later French is changed to . It is written
gelows or
iclous by
Wycliffe and his contemporaries; the form with
I is the ancestor of the modern form. At the end of words this
Z was pronounced
ts as in the English
assets, which comes from a late Latin
ad satis through an early French
assez "enough". See
English plural.
Z is also used in English to represent () in words like
azure,
seizure. But this sound appears even more frequently as
s-before-u, and as
si before other vowels as in
measure,
decision, etc., or in foreign words as
G, as in
rouge. The IPA character chosen for this sound in the nineteenth century is confused with another, much earlier obsolete character,
yogh.
Z is also used in writing to represent the act of
sleeping. It is used because human snoring often sounds like the pronunciation of the letter.
Few words in the
Basic English vocabulary begin with Z, though it occurs in words beginning with other letters. It is the most rarely used letter in written
English (but is the most frequently used of the consonants in the
Polish language).
Z was abolished in
Icelandic in 1974. In its place
s is used — as in the word
íslenska "Icelandic (language)", where formerly the combination of the
d of
Ísland and the
s of
-(i)sk was spelled
z.
In
English transliterated
Tamil script, "zh" is used to represent ழ
U+0BB4 (
ḻ,
ɹ).
Codes for computing
In
Unicode, the
capital Z is codepoint U+005A and the
lower case z is U+007A.
The
ASCII code for capital Z is 90 and for lowercase z is 122; or in
binary 01011010 and 01111010, correspondingly.
The
EBCDIC code for capital Z is 233 and for lowercase z is 169.
The
numeric character references in
HTML and
XML are "
Z" and "
z" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
