I regularly post FUN FACTS about the English language on my Facebook page, and they’re popular, so I thought I’d post some of them here.
The names of the letter Z (ZED if you’re British, ZEE if you’re from the US) both come from Old French ZEDE, from Greek ZETA, from Hebrew ZAYIN, literally meaning WEAPON (because it looks a bit like one). It is cognate with CEDILLA, the Spanish word for DIACRITIC MARKER, which literally means LITTLE ZED.
The name ZED and the letter itself entered in English in the 12th century. The Z sound is not native to English, and prior to that, it was written with a J, G, I or S in words borrowed from languages that did have a Z sound (which is why we have both JEALOUS and ZEALOUS, which are basically the same word, spelt differently).
ZEE has existed since at least the 17th century in some dialects, but really came into its own in the 18th century, when Noah Webster, the fanatically patriotic US dictionary compiler (he once had a go at George Washington because he thought he wasn’t patriotic enough, Seriously), who made it his life’s work to make US English as different as possible from British English, just to give the finger to the British, vehemently advocated it should be used by Americans instead of that horrid British ZED.
Another variant of the word ZED which used to be widely used in some parts of England is the word IZZARD. There’s a charming but utterly wrong folk etymology which says that this word is a corruption of S HARD (because it’s like an S, only HARDER SOUNDING) (folk etymology is linguistics speak for explanation of where a word comes from which somebody once randomly made up and which a lot of people believe, even though it’s a pile of pants). It’s probably either from French ET ZEDE (AND ZED, which is what children are often taught to say when they’re learning the alphabet…V, W, X, Y AND ZED) or the I is just a PROSTHETIC VOWEL (that means a vowel which shouldn’t be there but which gets stuck on a word to make it easier to pronounce. The E before S in Spanish is a PROSTHETIC VOWEL and is why Gloria Estefan is Gloria ESTEFAN and not Gloria STEFAN/STEPHENS).
melaniebranton 