Z

Z is the 26th and final letter of the modern Latin alphabet. In English, its name is typically pronounced "zed" in British usage or "zee" in American practice. The letter is used in many languages with similar shapes and often retains a related phonetic value. In addition to its basic alphabetic role, Z appears as a symbol in various scientific and mathematical contexts.

Origin and history: Z traces back to the Phoenician zayin, a symbol for a weapon. It was adopted into Greek as zeta and into Latin as z, appearing in the Latin alphabet largely for Greek loanwords. Z was not part of the earliest Latin letter inventory but was reintroduced during the Roman era to transliterate Greek names and terms. The modern form with a diagonal stroke emerged in medieval manuscript practices and became standardized in print.

Form and orthography: The letter has two forms: uppercase Z and lowercase z. In most scripts, Z is used at the beginning of sentences and proper nouns, while z occurs in the middle or end of words. Pronunciation varies by language; in English it represents a voiced sibilant /z/, though other languages assign different values to z in certain phonetic environments.

mathematic and science uses: In mathematics and related fields, Z commonly denotes the set of all integers, while z is widely used as a complex number or variable. The z-axis is the third axis in three-dimensional space. In statistics, a z-score measures the number of standard deviations a value is from the mean. In chemistry and physics, Z denotes the atomic number, the count of protons in an atom.

Encoding and typography: In Unicode, uppercase Z is U+005A and lowercase z is U+007A. In ASCII, these correspond to decimal codes 90 and 122, respectively. Z functions as a generic variable or label across disciplines and remains a flexible symbol in notation.