Z

In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, pronounced /ˈzɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (see below). In American English, its name is zee /ˈziː/, deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form. Another English dialectal form is izzard /ˈɪzərd/, 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, Polish, German, Romanian and Czech, zède in French, zæt in Danish, zäta in Swedish, zeta in Italian and in Spanish, and zê in Portuguese. However, several languages lacking the /z/ phoneme render it as /ts/, e.g. /tsεtɑ/.

The name of the Semitic symbol was zayin, possibly meaning "weapon", and was the seventh letter. It represented either z as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).

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.

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 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."

A graphical variant of tailed Z is Ezh, as adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative.

In Italian, Z represents two phonemes, namely /ts/ and /dz/; in German, it stands for /ts/, though it can be pronounced /tz/ or even /z/ in rapid speech; in Castilian Spanish it represents /θ/ (as English th in thing), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with /s/.

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