Americans pronounce the letter Z like “zee,” while those in other English-speaking countries say “zed.” That’s because Noah Webster proposed lots of Americanized pronunciations and this is one of the few that stuck. David Sacks’ book Letter Perfect is a great resource for more on our alphabet. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “British Zed and American Zee”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Kitsie Smith from Dallas, Texas.
How are you doing?
I’m good. How are you?
Excellent. Thank you.
I was just living in Australia for about two years.
Cool.
And, yeah, it was awesome. We were in Sydney.
And I have a three-year-old, and he was learning the alphabet.
And I noticed when he said the end of the alphabet, instead of saying Z, he said Zed.
And then I also heard people say, like, there’s a bank there called A and Zed Bank.
It’s A and Z.
And so it kind of dawned on me, they don’t say Z, they say Zed.
And I realized that Australians and the British also say Zed.
And so I was wondering, how did that come about that they say Zed and then we say Zee?
And we’re all, you know, different.
Mm—
Yeah, two countries separated by a common language, or three in that case, if you’re talking about Australia as well.
The interesting thing about Zed is that it goes back to the Greek letter Zeta.
It’s closer to the Greek letter Zeta than our letter Z.
So it found its way into English as Zed and a lot of dialectal variants of that in the British Isles, like Izzard and Uzzard and Zed.
And then when all the British settlers came over here, they were all using different versions of that.
And good old Noah Webster, who was trying to differentiate the American language from the English language and simplify things, he proposed that we use the letter Z instead of Zed.
So it was Noah Webster who got in there and interfered.
And this time was successful.
He wasn’t always successful.
No, almost never successful.
We remember his few successes.
There’s a path in there that I wanted to elaborate on.
That’s where Old French had it as two different spellings.
There was Z-E-D-E with an accent grave on the first knee, so it was Zed.
And then also it became Zé in Old French as well, Z with an acute accent on it.
And both of these were borrowed into English.
So the split happened even before the pronunciation of this letter entered into what we would call modern English.
It’s really interesting.
And now in Canada, there’s something interesting that reminds me of what you said about your three-year-old.
Apparently up there, according to the journal articles I’ve read, Canadian children learn the alphabet song as Americans sing it, you know, X, Y, and Z.
And then there’s kind of this ritual of puberty where they’re taught to say Zed.
And this is kind of just because they’re stuck.
They’re kind of halfway between American English and halfway between British English.
Today you are a man.
Now you must say said.
Well, this is what one of the journal articles said.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
It’s kind of just like they all go through this apparently.
Well, most of them.
Yeah.
It’s like their initiation into Canadian citizenship?
Yeah.
Adulthood?
And I wonder about Australia, you know, with American television being everywhere.
I know in Canada so much work has been done on Canadian English.
Z is slowly gaining on Z, and it is considered by many a point of pride not to acquire the American Z and stick to the Z.
It’s slowly, slowly, percent by percent, Z is winning out.
Wow, I didn’t know there was such a rich history.
There’s whole big parts of books that are simply about Z versus Z, because there’s a lot wrapped up.
You’ve heard Martha talk about it goes back to the Greeks, and then where did the Greeks get it?
And the Romans got it from the Greeks.
And how did the shape of the letter transform itself?
And why did, when the Romans put it on the end of their alphabet, did it stay there for the next several thousand years?
Right, because the last letter of the Greek alphabet, of course, is not Zeta.
It’s Omega.
Crazy stuff.
Crazy, crazy stuff about this one letter and the sounds that it’s represented over the years.
Yeah, and how it’s tied up in our culture.
Well, that is really interesting.
I’m so glad you all solved that mystery for me.
Very good.
Sure, glad to help.
Glad to help.
Thank you so much.
Take care, Nell.
Have a great day.
Bye-bye.
Thank you, too.
Bye-bye.
Bye, Kitsie.
I don’t know that there is another letter in the alphabet that has such a great story, but I know there are lots of books about the alphabet.
Right, right.
I love Letter Perfect by David Sachs.
Very good.
He’s passionately in love with all 26 of them.
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