Z
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This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see Z (disambiguation).

ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg
Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu
Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz


 
Cursive script 'z' and capital 'Z'
Z (named zed /ˈzɛd/ or zee /ˈziː/[1]) is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Contents  [hide] 
1 Name and pronunciation
2 History
2.1 Semitic
2.2 Greek
2.3 Etruscan
2.4 Latin
2.5 Last letter of the alphabet
2.6 Blackletter Z
3 Use in English
4 Use in other languages
5 Related letters and other similar characters
6 Computing codes
7 Other representations
8 See also
9 References
10 External links
Name and pronunciation[edit]

In most dialects of English, the letter's name is 'zed' /ˈzɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta, but in American English, its name is 'zee' /ˈziː/, deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form.[2]
Another English dialectal form is izzard /ˈɪzərd/. It dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta,[1] perhaps a popular form with a prosthetic vowel.
Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: zeta in Italian, Spanish and Icelandic (no longer part of its alphabet but found in personal names), zäta in Swedish, zæt in Danish, zet in Dutch, Polish, Romanian and Czech, Zett in German (capitalised as noun), zett in Norwegian, zède in French, and zê in Portuguese.
Several languages lacking /z/ as phoneme render it as /ts/~(/dz/), e.g. zeta /tsetɑ/ or /tset/ in Finnish. In Mandarin Chinese pinyin the name of the letter Z is pronounced [tsɨ], although the English 'zed' and American English 'zee' have become very common.
History[edit]

Phoenician  
Zayin	Etruscan
Z	Greek
Zeta
		
Semitic[edit]
The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin which possibly meant "weapon". It represented either z as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).
Greek[edit]
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 /dz/; in Attic, from the 4th century BC onwards, it seems to have been either /zd/ or a /dz/, 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 /ð/ and /θ/, respectively). In the common dialect (κοινη) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became /z/, as it remains in modern Greek.
Etruscan[edit]
In Etruscan, Z may have represented /ts/.
Latin[edit]
In the 1st century BC, Z was introduced again at the end of the Latin alphabet to accurately represent the sound of the Greek zeta. The letter Z appeared only in Greek words, and is the only letter besides Y that the Romans took directly from Greek, rather than from Etruscan.
Earlier zeta was transliterated as s at the beginning and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη "belt" and trapessita for τραπεζίτης "banker".
In Vulgar Latin, Z seems to have represented the affricate /dʒ/ which was the reflex of Classical /j/ or /dj/, e.g., zanuariu for ianuariu "January", ziaconus for diaconus "deacon", or oze for hodie "today".[3] Likewise, /di/ sometimes replaced /z/ in words like baptidiare for baptizare "to baptize". Eventually, it came to represent /ts/ or /dz/ instead, as gi came to be used for /dʒ/, the sounds they still have in Italian today. In other languages like Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred.
Last letter of the alphabet[edit]
In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. [1] 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."[4]
Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters, such as the Icelandic and Swedish making Ö the last one or Å in case of the Danish and Norwegian.
Blackletter Z[edit]
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. Combined with long s (ſ), it is the origin of the ß (Eszett) ligature in the German alphabet.
Z in an Antiqua typeface may be identical with the character representing 3 in other fonts.
A graphical variant of tailed Z is Ezh, as adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative. Tailed Z is to be distinguished from the similar insular G and yogh found in Old English, Irish, Middle English, etc.
Unicode assigns codepoints U+2128 ℨ black-letter capital z (HTML: ℨ) and U+1D537