Z

Z is the twenty-sixth letter of the English alphabet and the last.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

In American English, the letter is named zee, while in British English the letter is named zed. An older name, izzard, is rarely heard.

Z is put at the end of the alphabet because it occupied that position in the Latin alphabet. In early Latin the sound represented by Z passed into R, and consequently the symbol became useless. It was therefore removed from the alphabet and G put in its place. In the 1st century BC it was, like Y, introduced again at the end, in order to represent more precisely than was before possible the value of the Greek Z or zeta, which had been previously spelled with S at the beginning and ss in the middle of words: sona = ζωνη, "belt"; tarpessita=ταρπεζτης, "banker."

Until recent times the alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. For & the English name is ampersand, that is, "and per se and," though the Scottish name epershand, that is, "Et, per se and", is more logical and also more clearly shows its origin to be the Latin et, of which it is but the manuscript form.

George Eliot refers to the following of Z 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."

(see SAMPA for meaning of all those phonetic symbols).

The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician symbol I, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout.

In Semitic (Zajin) and Ancient Greek the letter was probably pronounced as /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero). In Modern Greek, it is pronounced as /z/, as in English and French.

The name of the Semitic symbol was Zayin, but this name, for some unknown reason, was not adopted by the Greeks, who called it Zeta. Whether, as seems most likely, Zeta was the name of one of the other Semitic sibilants, Zade (Tzaddi) transferred to this by mistake, or whether the name is a new one, made in imitation of Eta (η) and Theta (θ), is disputed. The pronunciation of the Semitic letter was the voiced S, like the ordinary use of Z in English, as in zodiac, raze.

It is probable that in Greek there was a considerable variety of pronunciation from dialect to dialect. In the earlier Greek of Athens, Northwest Greece and Lesbos the pronunciation seems to have been zd, in Attic from the 4th century BC onwards it seems to have been only a voiced s, and this also was probably the pronunciation of the dialect from which Latin borrowed its Greek words. In other dialects, as Elean and Cretan, the symbol was apparently used for sounds resembling the English voiced and unvoiced th (ð, þ). In the common dialect (κοινι) which succeeded the older dialects, ζ became a voiced S, as it remains in modern Greek.

In Etruscan, Z probably symbolized /ts/, in Latin, [dz] (in Latin, the letter appeared only in Greek words, and Z is the only letter besides Y that the Romans took over directly from the Greek, and unlike all other letters not via Etruscan.)

In Vulgar Latin the Greek Z seems to have been pronounced as dy and later y; di being found for Z in words like baptidiare for baptizare, "baptize," while conversely Z appears for di in forms like zaconus, zabulus, for diaconus, "deacon," diabulus, "devil." Z also is often written for the consonantal I (that is, J) as in zunior for junior, "younger".

In Italian, Z represents two phonemes, namely /ts/ and /dz/; in German, it stands for /ts/; in Castilian Spanish it represents /T/ (as English th in thing), in American Spanish it stands for /s/ (caza and casa are thus homophonous in American Spanish, but not in Castilian).

Besides the above Latin forms, there was a more cultured Vulgate pronunciation of Z as dz, which passed through French into Middle English.

Early English had 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 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 dz which in later French is changed to Z (voiced s). It is written gelows or iclous by Wycliffe and his contemporaries, the form with I is the ancestor of the modern form. The later word zealous was borrowed after the French dz had become Z. 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 asez, "enough." See English plural.

With Z also is frequently written zh, the voiced form of sh, in azure, seizure. But it appears even more frequently as s-before-u, and as si or ti before other vowels in measure, decision, transition, etc., or in foreign words as G, as in rouge. For the <inverted ε> representing G and Y in Scottish proper names see under V.

Z is also:

• In cartoons, the sound of snoring, often represented as "zzz...".
• In chemistry and physics, Z is the symbol for Atomic number.
• In mathematics, Z is often used to denote the set of integers.
• A formal specification language used for computing systems, see Z notation
• A movie, see Z movie