Z, or z, is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its usual names in English are zed (/ˈzɛd/) and zee (/ˈziː/), with an occasional archaic variant izzard (/ˈɪzərd/).[1]
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed X, Y, and Z from Greek, along with their names), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc., and deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form.[2]
Another English dialectal form is izzard /ˈɪzərd/. This 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 Vulgar Latin form with a prosthetic vowel. Its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese.[3]
Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: zeta in Italian, Basque, and Spanish, seta in Icelandic (no longer part of its alphabet but found in personal names), zê in Portuguese, zäta in Swedish, zæt in Danish, zet in Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, and Czech, Zett in German (capitalised as a noun), zett in Norwegian, zède in French, zetto (ゼット) in Japanese, and zét in Vietnamese. Several languages render it as /ts/ or /dz/, e.g. tseta /tseta/ or more rarely tset /tset/ in Finnish (sometimes dropping the first t altogether; /seta/, or /set/ the latter of which is not very commonplace). In Standard Chinese pinyin, the name of the letter Z is pronounced [tsɨ], as in "zi", although the English zed and zee have become very common. In Esperanto the name of the letter Z is pronounced /zo/.
The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin, which meant "weapon" or "sword". It represented either the sound /z/ as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).
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 (η) and theta (θ).