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45-793: Z , or z , is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the Latin alphabet . It is used in the modern English alphabet , in the alphabets of other Western European languages, and in others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed ( / ˈ z ɛ d / ), which is most commonly used in British English and zee ( / ˈ z iː / ), most commonly used in North American English, with an occasional archaic variant izzard ( / ˈ ɪ z ər d / ). In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and
90-411: A multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,
135-509: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in
180-539: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c. 1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from
225-673: A noun), zett in Norwegian , zède in French , zetto ( ゼット ) in Japanese , and giét in Vietnamese (not part of its alphabet ). Several languages render it as / ts / or / dz / , e.g. tseta /ˈtsetɑ/ or more rarely tset /tset/ in Finnish (sometimes dropping the first t altogether; /ˈsetɑ/ , or /set/ the latter of which is not very commonplace). In Standard Chinese pinyin ,
270-634: A sequence /rz/ ) and ⟨sz⟩ ( / ʂ / ), and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language. (Other Slavic languages avoid digraphs and mark the corresponding phonemes with the háček (caron) diacritic: ⟨č⟩ , ⟨ď⟩ , ⟨ř⟩ , ⟨š⟩ ; this system has its origin in Czech orthography of the Hussite period.) ⟨z⟩ can also appear with diacritical marks, namely ⟨ź⟩ and ⟨ż⟩ , which are used to represent
315-428: Is also used in place of the obsolete letter ⟨ȝ⟩ ( yogh ), which represents / g / and / j / . Whilst there are a few common nouns which use ⟨z⟩ in this manner, such as brulzie (pronounced 'brulgey' meaning broil), ⟨z⟩ as a yogh substitute is more common in people's names and placenames. Often the names are pronounced to follow the apparent English spelling, so Mackenzie
360-569: Is commonly pronounced with / z / . Menzies, however, retains the pronunciation of 'Mingus'. Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, ⟨z⟩ usually stands for [z] , such as in Azerbaijani , Igbo , Indonesian , Shona , Swahili , Tatar , Turkish , and Zulu . ⟨z⟩ represents [ d͡z ] in Northern Sami and Inari Sami . In Turkmen , ⟨z⟩ represents [ ð ] . In
405-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have
450-653: Is disputed. See Ancient Greek phonology and Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching . Most handbooks agree on attributing to it the pronunciation /zd/ (like Mazda ), but some scholars believe that it was an affricate / dz / (like adze). The modern pronunciation was, in all likelihood, established in the Hellenistic age and may have already been a common practice in Classical Attic ; for example, it could count as one or two consonants metrically in Attic drama. Zeta has
495-662: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Zeta (letter) Zeta ( UK : / ˈ z iː t ə / , US : / ˈ z eɪ t ə / ; uppercase Ζ , lowercase ζ ; Ancient Greek : ζῆτα , Demotic Greek : ζήτα , classical [d͡zɛ̌ːta] or [zdɛ̌ːta] zē̂ta ; Greek pronunciation: [ˈzita] zíta )
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#1732855783101540-629: Is likewise expressed /ts/ in Old Norse . In Italian , it represents two phonemes, / t͡s / and / d͡z / . In Portuguese , it stands for / z / in most cases, but also for / s / or / ʃ / (depending on the regional variant) at the end of syllables. In Basque, it represents the sound / s / . Castilian Spanish uses the letter to represent / θ / (as English ⟨th⟩ in thing ), though in other dialects ( Latin American , Andalusian ) this sound has merged with / s / . Before voiced consonants,
585-483: Is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, such as Elean and Cretan , the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and voiceless th (IPA / ð / and / θ / , respectively). In the common dialect ( koine ) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became / z / , as it remains in modern Greek. The Etruscan letter Z was derived from the Phoenician alphabet , most probably through
630-535: Is preferred over -yze in Oxford spelling, as it is closer to the original Greek roots of words like analyse . The most common variety of English it is used in is American English , which prefers both the -ize and -yze endings. One native Germanic English word that contains 'z', freeze (past froze , participle frozen ) came to be spelled that way by convention, even though it could have been spelled with 's' (as with choose , chose and chosen ). ⟨z⟩
675-515: Is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes , the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called
720-678: Is the ancestor of zed , the name of the Latin letter Z in Commonwealth English. Swedish and many Romance languages (such as Italian and Spanish ) do not distinguish between the Greek and Roman forms of the letter; " zeta " is used to refer to the Roman letter Z as well as the Greek letter. The letter ζ represents the voiced alveolar fricative IPA: [z] in Modern Greek . The sound represented by zeta in Greek before 400 BC
765-498: Is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet . In the system of Greek numerals , it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter zayin [REDACTED] . Letters that arose from zeta include the Roman Z and Cyrillic З . Unlike the other Greek letters , this letter did not take its name from the Phoenician letter from which it was derived; it was given a new name on the pattern of beta , eta and theta . The word zeta
810-462: Is the sound had disappeared from Latin, making the letter useless for spelling Latin words. Whatever the case may be, Appius Claudius' distaste for the letter Z is today credited as the reason for its removal. A few centuries later, after the Roman Conquest of Greece , Z was again borrowed to spell words from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek. Before the reintroduction of z , the sound of zeta
855-604: Is used in writing to represent the act of sleeping (often using multiple z's, like zzzz ), as an onomatopoeia for the sound of closed-mouth human snoring . ⟨z⟩ stands for a voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant / z / , in Albanian , Breton , Czech , Dutch , French , Hungarian , Latvian , Lithuanian , Romanian , Serbo-Croatian , and Slovak . It stands for / t͡s / in Chinese pinyin and Jyutping , Finnish (occurs in loanwords only), and German , and
900-595: The Basic English vocabulary begin or end with ⟨z⟩ , though it occurs within other words. It is the least frequently used letter in written English , with a frequency of about 0.08% in words. ⟨z⟩ is more common in the Oxford spelling of British English than in standard British English , as this variant prefers the more etymologically 'correct' -ize endings, which are closer to Greek , to -ise endings, which are closer to French ; however, -yse
945-475: 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 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." Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on
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#1732855783101990-483: The International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨z⟩ represents the voiced alveolar sibilant . The graphical variant ⟨ ʒ ⟩ was adopted as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) In a writing system , a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme —the smallest functional unit of speech—though there
1035-539: The Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively. In modern English orthography , the letter ⟨z⟩ usually represents the sound / z / . It represents / ʒ / in words like seizure . More often, this sound appears as ⟨su⟩ or ⟨si⟩ in words such as measure , decision , etc. In all these words, / ʒ / developed from earlier / zj / by yod -coalescence . Few words in
1080-728: The Nihon-shiki , Kunrei-shiki , and Hepburn romanisations of Japanese , ⟨z⟩ stands for a phoneme whose allophones include [ z ] and [ dz ] (see Yotsugana ). Additionally, in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki systems, ⟨z⟩ is used to represent that same phoneme before / i / , where it's pronounced [ d͡ʑ ~ ʑ ] . In the Jyutping romanization of Cantonese , ⟨z⟩ represents / ts / . Other romanizations use either ⟨j⟩ , ⟨ch⟩ , or ⟨ts⟩ . In
1125-559: The doublet forms jealous and zealous . Both of these come from a late Latin zelosus , derived from the imported Greek ζῆλος zêlos . The earlier form is jealous ; its initial sound is the [ dʒ ] , which developed to Modern French [ ʒ ] . John Wycliffe wrote the word as gelows or ielous . Z at the end of a word was pronounced ts , as in English assets , from Old French asez "enough" ( Modern French assez ), from Vulgar Latin ad satis ("to sufficiency"). In earlier times,
1170-692: The Early Modern Blackletter typefaces. In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Ligated with long s (ſ), it is part of the origin of the Eszett (ß) in the German alphabet . The character came to be indistinguishable from the yogh (ȝ) in Middle English writing. Unicode assigns codepoints U+2128 ℨ BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL Z ( ℨ, ℨ ) and U+1D537 𝔷 MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR SMALL Z ( 𝔷 ) in
1215-593: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c. 3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c. 1800 BCE , representing
1260-485: The Greek alphabet used on the island of Ischia. In Etruscan , this letter may have represented / ts / . The letter Z was borrowed from the Greek Zeta, most likely to represent the sound / t͡s /. At c. 300 BC , Appius Claudius Caecus , the Roman censor , removed the letter Z from the alphabet, allegedly due to his distaste for the letter, in that it "looked like the tongue of a corpse". A more likely explanation
1305-706: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c. 900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet
1350-549: The United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed / z ɛ d / , reflecting its derivation from the Greek letter zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee / z iː / , analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc., and deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form. Another English dialectal form is izzard / ˈ ɪ z ər d / . This dates from
1395-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage
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1440-622: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩
1485-527: The end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic , Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö , while it is Å for Danish and Norwegian . In the German alphabet, the umlauts ( Ä/ä , Ö/ö , and Ü/ü ) and the letter ß ( Eszett or scharfes S ) are regarded respectively as modifications of the vowels a/o/u and as a (standardized) variant spelling of ss , not as independent letters, so they come after
1530-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and
1575-984: The mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed , whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta , perhaps a Vulgar Latin form with a prosthetic vowel. Outside of the anglosphere, its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese . 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 (capitalized as
1620-491: 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
1665-477: The numerical value 7 rather than 6 because the letter digamma (ϝ, also called ' stigma ' as a Greek numeral ) was originally in the sixth position in the alphabet. The uppercase zeta is not used, because it is normally identical to Latin Z . The lower case letter can be used to represent: ZETA (fusion reactor) (all uppercase) was an early fusion experiment. These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using
1710-453: The reflexes of ianuarius and hodie are written with the letter g (representing /dʒ/ when before i and e ): gennaio , oggi . In other languages, such as Spanish , further evolution of the sound occurred. Old English 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 seen in
1755-507: The sound /s/ and thus shares the value of ⟨s⟩ ; it normally occurs only in loanwords that are spelt with ⟨z⟩ in the source languages. The letter ⟨z⟩ on its own represents / z / in Polish . It is also used in four of the seven officially recognized digraphs: ⟨cz⟩ ( / t͡ʂ / ), ⟨dz⟩ ( / d͡z / or / t͡s / ), ⟨rz⟩ ( / ʐ / or / ʂ / , sometimes it represents
1800-537: The sound is voiced to [ ð ] or [ z ] , sometimes debbucalized to [ ɦ ] (as in the surname Guzmán [ɡuðˈman] , [ɡuzˈman] or [ɡuɦˈman] ). This is the only context in which ⟨z⟩ can represent a voiced sibilant [ z ] in Spanish, though ⟨s⟩ also represents [ z ] (or [ ɦ ] , depending on the dialect) in this environment. In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, ⟨z⟩ usually stands for
1845-497: The sounds / ʑ / and / ʐ / . They also appear in the digraphs ⟨dź⟩ ( / d͡ʑ / or / t͡ɕ / ) and ⟨dż⟩ ( / d͡ʐ / or / t͡ʂ / ). Hungarian uses ⟨z⟩ in the digraphs ⟨sz⟩ (expressing / s / , as opposed to the value of ⟨s⟩ , which is ʃ ), and ⟨zs⟩ (expressing ʒ ). The letter ⟨z⟩ on its own represents / z / . In Modern Scots , ⟨z⟩ usually represents / z / , but
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1890-426: The unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with z . The variant with a stroke ⟨Ƶƶ⟩ and the lower-case tailed Z ⟨ʒ⟩ , though distinct characters, can also be considered to be allographs of ⟨Z⟩ / ⟨z⟩ . Tailed Z (German geschwänztes Z , also Z mit Unterschlinge ) originated in the medieval Gothic minuscules and
1935-496: Was a close copy of the Phoenician Zayin ( [REDACTED] ), 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 stood for /zd/ and / dz / – there
1980-456: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in
2025-659: Was written s at the beginning of words and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη "belt" and trapessita for τραπεζίτης "banker". In some inscriptions, z represented a Vulgar Latin sound, likely an affricate , formed by the merging of the reflexes of Classical Latin / j / , /dj/ and /gj/ : for example, zanuariu for ianuariu "January", ziaconus for diaconus "deacon", and oze for hodie "today". Likewise, /di/ sometimes replaced / z / in words like baptidiare for baptizare "to baptize". In modern Italian, z represents / ts / or / dz / , whereas
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