![]() The Greeks called it zeta, a new name made in imitation of eta (η) and theta (θ). 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. It represented either the sound / z/ as in English and French, or possibly more like / dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero). The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin, which meant "weapon" or "sword". Under the NATO spelling alphabet, the letter is signified with ZULU, like the Zulu people. In Esperanto the name of the letter Z is pronounced /zo/. In Standard Chinese pinyin, the name of the letter Z is pronounced, as in "zi", although the English zed and zee have become very common. 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). Several languages render it as / ts/ or / dz/, e.g. 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. ![]() Its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese. This dates from 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. Īnother English dialectal form is izzard / ˈ ɪ z ər d/. In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed / z ɛ d/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek 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. Its usual names in English are zed ( / ˈ z ɛ d/) and zee ( / ˈ z iː/), with an occasional archaic variant izzard ( / ˈ ɪ z ər d/). Z (or z) is the 26th and last letter of the Latin alphabet, as used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. ![]()
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