Z

Z

       Z is pronounced as zed or Zee. It is the final letter (26^th) in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Pronunciation

In American English”Z” is pronounced as Zee. But in most accents of English the name of the letter is Zed. Its Pronunciation is derived from the Greek zeta.

The following table shows how this letter (Z) is pronounced in various languages.

Even “Z” is pronounced in several ways, English Zee and Zed are more very common forms.

Historical Trace

Initially English alphabets were end up with “&” not with “Z”.  Authors Adam Bede, George Eliot in one of their novels published in 1859 have stated as Z being followed by &. In International Phonetic Alphabet “Z” is used especially for the voiced alveolar sibilant.
Greek

The Greek representation of “Z” is closely related to Phoenician symbol “I”. The Greeks used to call it as “Zeta” which is derived from eta (η) & theta (θ).In earlier times in Northwest Greece & in Athens this letter was represented as /dz/. In Elean and Cretan accents this symbol is used for a sound that resembles the English voiced & unvoiced th .As a whole what we are using now /z/ is derived from the symbol ζ.

Pictorial representations

Phoenician zayin      Greek zeta

Etruscan

In Etruscan, the letter “Z” may be represented as /ts/.

Pictorial representation

semitic

                                                                         Semitic
In Semitic symbol set zayin was the seventh letter which means “weapon”. Just as in English& French it represented “Z”.

Latin

In Old Latin /z/ (consonant) is developed into /r/. From the time being the symbol created for /z/ became outdated. So it was simply removed from the set of alphabet and the letter “G” was introduced in that place. This updation was made around 300 BC.
Z was re-introduced again in the 1st century. This time it was added at the end of the Latin alphabet. Initially” Z “was appeared only in Greek words .later Romans adopted “Z” from the Greek.
In earlier stages in the beginning zeta was transcribed as s and in the middle it was transcribed as ss.

Linguistic usage 

    In German Z denotes the phoneme /ts/. In Italian it represents /ts/ and /dz/.
In Spanish Z denotes /θ/ (from English representation just like th in everything)

English

In old English S was used for both voiced and unvoiced sibilant. The Latin phoneme imported  via French was not usually written in the combination of Z with G. but it was used with /.the continuous changes can be observed from the same originals. Example: jealous & zealous. These two words were derived from the Greek the Greek word zêlos .When “z” is used at the final word, it will be pronounced as ts. In some words Z denotes /ʒ/ like azure in English .Z also sounds like si or su in some words. (Example: Pleasure).

Finnish

As far as Finnish is concerned “Z” is pronounced as /ts/.formally [z] is pronounced just like Azeri but in day to day life [z] is pronounced as /s/.

Japanese

In Japanese Z is represents a sound which includes [z] and [dz].
Polish
In Polish there are nearly seven officially recognized digraphs and [z] serves as one of them. It is stands as the most frequently used consonant in Polish.

Icelandic

In 1973, the letter z was replaced with the letter s in Icelandic language.

Character Encoding

The following table specifies value of “Z” in some character Encodings
Character            Latin                       Latin
 Encoding     capital letter Z     small letter Z
                         Decimal hex       Decimal   hex
Unicode           90       005A        122            007A
ASCII              90          5A             122           7A
UTF-8             90           5A             122           7A
EBCDIC          233        E9              169           A9

Frequency of z among all other alphabets is 0.074%. Z is the least used word in English.

What Does “Z” Stand for in various fields?

General

Z – Stands for zodiac

Zodiac is a circular diagram representing the 12 zodiacal constellations and showing their signs.

Z -denotes the measure Zentner (German 50kg)

Since the sound of “Z” Generally represents snoring,”Z” is used to denote the act of sleeping.

Science

Z denotes number of protons in nucleus (Physics)

Mathematics

Z-denotes Set of Integers.