Semitic The
Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named
zayin, which meant "weapon" or "sword". It represented either the sound as in English and French, or possibly more like (as in Italian '
, ').
Greek 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). 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 stood for and – there 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 and , respectively). In the common dialect (
koine) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became , as it remains in modern Greek.
Etruscan The
Etruscan letter
Z was derived from the
Phoenician alphabet, most probably through the Greek alphabet used on the island of Ischia. In
Etruscan, this letter may have represented .
Latin The letter
Z existed in more archaic versions of Latin, but at ,
Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman
censor, removed the letter Z from the alphabet, because the appearance while pronouncing it imitated a grinning skull. A more likely explanation is that the sound that it probably represented had disappeared from Latin after turning into due to a
rhotacism process, making the letter useless for spelling Latin words. Whatever the case may be, Appius Claudius's 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 was written
s at the beginning of words and
ss in the middle of words, as in '
for "belt" and ' for "banker". In some inscriptions,
z represented a
Vulgar Latin sound, likely an
affricate, formed by the merging of the
reflexes of
Classical Latin , and : for example, '
for ' "January", '
for ' "deacon", and '
for ' "today". Likewise, sometimes replaced in words like '
for ' "to baptize". In modern Italian,
z represents or , whereas the reflexes of '
and ' are written with the letter
g (representing when before
i and
e): '
, '. In other languages, such as
Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred.
Old English 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 the
doublet forms
jealous and
zealous. Both of these come from a late Latin '
, derived from the imported Greek '. The earlier form is
jealous; its initial sound is the , which developed to
Modern French .
John Wycliffe wrote the word as or .
Z at the end of a word was pronounced
ts, as in English
assets, from
Old French '
"enough" (Modern French '), from
Vulgar Latin '''' ("to sufficiency").
Last letter of the alphabet In earlier times, the
English alphabets used by children terminated not with
Z but with
& or related typographic symbols. Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on 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. The German alphabet ends with
Z, as the umlauts (
Ä/ä,
Ö/ö, and
Ü/ü) and the letter
ß ( or ) 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 the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order.
Typographic variants The
variant with a stroke and the lower-case
tailed Z , though distinct characters, can also be considered to be
allographs of /. Tailed Z (German '
, also ') originated in the medieval
Gothic minuscules and 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, leading to the
apparently anomalous pronunciation of the surname
Menzies.
Unicode assigns codepoints and in the
Letterlike Symbols and
Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively. Image:Z-small-VA-64x88.svg|lowercase
cursive z Image:Z-small-Variante.svg|tailed
z in a sans-serif typeface ==Use in writing systems==