The Illuminated Letter "Z"

Additional Illuminated letter "Z"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.

Z (named zed /ˈzɛd/' or zee /ˈziː/) is the 26th and final letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

       For most of the world's native English speakers, including those in Britain, Canada, Ireland, and Australia, the letter's name is 'zed' /ˈzɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed X, Y, and Z from Greek, along with their names), but in American English its name is 'zee' /ˈziː/, 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 /ˈɪzərd/. It 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 popular form with a prosthetic vowel.

       Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: zeta in Italian, Basque, Spanish, and Icelandic (no longer part of its alphabet but found in personal names), zäta in Swedish, zæt in Danish, zet in Dutch, Polish, Romanian, and Czech, Zett in German (capitalised as noun), zett in Norwegian, zède in French, zê in Portuguese, and zét in Vietnamese. Several languages render it as /ts/ or /dz/, e.g. zeta /tsetɑ/ or /tset/ in Finnish. In Standard Chinese pinyin the name of the letter Z is pronounced [tsɨ], although the English 'zed' and 'zee' have become very common. Read more . . .