Z

'Z' is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the modern Latin alphabet.
In many dialects of English, the letter's name is pronounced 'zed' , reflecting its derivation from the Greek ''zeta'' (see below). In American English dialects, however, its name is pronounced 'zee' , deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form. Another English dialectal form is 'izzard', which dates from the mid-18th century, probably deriving from the French ''et zède'', meaning "and z," or else from "s hard." A variant 'izzed' is the predominant form in anglophone South Asia.
Other Indo-European languages pronounce the letter's name in a similar fashion, such as ''zet'' in Dutch, ''zède'' in French, ''zett'' in German, ''zeta'' in Italian and Spanish, ''zê'' in Portuguese, and ''se'' (''ze'') in Russian.

Contents

History

Blackletter Z

Usage

Codes for computing

See also

Notes

External links

History

Proto-Semitic Z	Phoenician Z	Etruscan Z	Greek Zeta
Proto-semiticZ-01.png	PhoenicianZ-01.png	EtruscanZ-01.png

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".
Until recent times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with ''Z'' but with ''&'' or related typographic symbols. 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+2182 and U+1D537 , respectively.

Usage

In Italian, ''Z'' represents two phonemes, namely and ; in German, it stands for ; in Castilian Spanish it represents (as English ''th'' in ''thing''), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with .
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses for the voiced alveolar sibilant. 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 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 (IPA ) 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; for which, see Yogh.
Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin with Z, though it occurs in words beginning with other letters. It is also the most rarely used letter in the English language.
For the use of "z" in such Scottish names as ''Culzean, Menzies'' or ''Dalziel'', see: yogh.
(See: ''IPA chart for English'', for the meaning of all the above phonetic symbols.).
In (mostly humorous) comics and cartoons, Z is often used as symbolism for sleep or snoring; this has led to the American expression "getting some Zs" as a slang term of sleeping.
In Shakespeare's ''King Lear'', Z is used as an insult. A character is called "Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter!" (II.ii), intimating that Z, in Shakespearean English, was regarded as a useless letter, like the person on the receiving end of the insult.
In the television series ''Zorro,'' the title character leaves his mark by slashing a large "Z" on a wall (or even over the belly of the unfortunate Sergeant Garcia (Henry Calvin)).

Codes for computing

In Unicode, the capital "Z" is codepoint U+005A and the lowercase "z" is U+007A.
The ASCII code for capital "Z" is 90 and for lowercase "z" is 122;

The code values for uppercase and lowercase ''Z''
differ by the value of a blank space, which in
ASCII has a blank='20'x=32 added, and in EBCDIC,
has a blank='40'x=64 subtracted to get the value of
the lowercase letter.

or in binary, 01011010 and 01111010, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital "Z" is 233 and for lowercase "z" is 169 (64 less).
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "Z" and "z" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

For other uses and meanings of the letter "Z", see Z (disambiguation). See also:

★ Zed

★ Zee

★ Ž

★ Ź

★ Ż

★ Ezh

★ Ƶ

★ Zzz

Notes

External links

★ "Zee" versus "Zed" in the southern Ontario Public School System