# Are Americans really unaware the letter "Z" is pronounced "Zed" in the UK/Australia/NZ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 3, 2013, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399 "2013-05-03T09:33:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/1 "2013-05-03T09:33:00Z")
Something which came up in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=685952&page=7)here - apparently significant numbers of Americans are unaware the letter “Z” is pronounced “Zed” in the UK (and Australia, and New Zealand). So: Is this really true? Are significant numbers of Americans really unaware of the Commonwealth pronounciation of the letter Z? And if so, why? I mean, all of us in the Commonwealth know you prounounce the letter “Zee”, so why not the other way around? I maintain, as I did in the other thread, it’s the sort of thing a reasonably intelligent adult American with an internet connection would surely have encountered at some point (YouTube clip, Dr Who, “Ways those wacky Limeys are different to us” jokes, etc) but apparently not, it seems. 😕 ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 9:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/2 "2013-05-03T09:39:15Z")
I’d imagine it’s fairly common, when does it ever come up? You get our TV shows and movies and pop culture. You’d be exposed to “zee” on a regular basis. You may be overestimating how much commonwealth popular culture is imported in the US. Very little. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/3 "2013-05-03T10:08:26Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > I’d imagine it’s fairly common, when does it ever come up? You get our TV shows and movies and pop culture. You’d be exposed to “zee” on a regular basis. You may be overestimating how much commonwealth popular culture is imported in the US. Very little. Lots of Americans seem pretty familiar with British comedy series etc. Isn’t BBC America pretty popular over there? Also as I mentioned in the other thread, what about the quote from _Pulp Fiction_: “Zed’s dead, baby”? If you don’t know Zed = Z, isn’t that a pretty nonsensical name? ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/4 "2013-05-03T10:14:50Z")
> [@Colophon](#): > > Lots of Americans seem pretty familiar with British comedy series etc. Isn’t BBC America pretty popular over there? > > Also as I mentioned in the other thread, what about the quote from _Pulp Fiction_: “Zed’s dead, baby”? If you don’t know Zed = Z, isn’t that a pretty nonsensical name? The BBC America is not that popular. And though I’ve watched plenty of BBC programs myself, I can’t think of any that illustrated the fact that Brits say zed. As for **Pulp Fiction** , Zed is a character’s name. He is dead. We don’t need to know that Zed means something other than that to make some sense of the statement. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/5 "2013-05-03T10:21:14Z")
Because Americans don’t give a fuck about other countries. Also, if your question is “do Americans really not know X?” the answer is yes. ---
**Author:** ![sugaree](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@sugaree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sugaree)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/6 "2013-05-03T10:37:01Z")
Yeah, BBC America is really a niche thing, with a cult following. I know a few Dr. Who fans, but the vast majority of my IRL circle wouldn’t be able to identify the Tardis. Zed would be short for Zedikiah or Zederiah. ---
**Author:** ![SanVito](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sanvito/32/2805_2.png) [@SanVito](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SanVito)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/7 "2013-05-03T10:38:13Z")
To be fair, I was pretty advanced in teen years before I clocked that Americans say ‘Zee’. I was too old to be watching Sesame Street and I didn’t even twig when ZZ Top were in the charts – I just assumed they didn’t spell out their full name, you know, Zee Zee Top. If I’d only ever seen it on an album sleeve, I would’ve assumed it was pronounced Zed Zed Top. Of course, around the same time, everyone I knew pronounced Nike to rhyme with bike. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/8 "2013-05-03T10:39:10Z")
To be fair, going the other way I never realised that Americans write dates as month/day/year till I was about 26. It just…never came up. I can easily see this slipping under the radar. Clearly, though, enough people _did_ get it in the linked thread to riff on it with you though. “Hey WTF _Zed??_” didn’t show up until about the 4th response. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/9 "2013-05-03T10:55:23Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > I’d imagine it’s fairly common, when does it ever come up? You get our TV shows and movies and pop culture. You’d be exposed to “zee” on a regular basis. You may be overestimating how much commonwealth popular culture is imported in the US. Very little. The UK is ruled by a Queen, has a lot of old buildings, and people drink tea. Australia has kangaroos & convicts. New Zealand is the part of Australia where Xena lives. That about sums up the average American’s knowledge of the Commonwealth. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/10 "2013-05-03T10:56:01Z")
And inCanada, too. Why do you marginalize us so? (;)) ---
**Author:** ![Skara\_Brae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f0a364/32.png) [@Skara\_Brae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skara_Brae)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/11 "2013-05-03T10:59:32Z")
Canadians use “zed” too. The only reason I know is because on Stargate Atlantis, Rodney, a Canadian character used to call their power source a “Zed”-P-M while everyone else called it a ZPM. ---
**Author:** ![Heracles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heracles/32/487_2.png) [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 11:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/12 "2013-05-03T11:02:24Z")
I once saw a clip of David Letterman doing a local promo for his show on WPTZ (Plattsburgh, NY, I think). Somebody had just asked him to pronounce W-P-T-Zed (because much of the WPTZ audience was in Québec, and it’s pronounced Zed in French too). He had never heard of such a thing. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/13 "2013-05-03T11:05:01Z")
It’s not that “Americans don’t care” about other cultures – it’s that their exposure to them isurtailed. There is a vast range of cultural content – television, movies, literature, comics, magazines, and so forth – that simply isn’t distributed in the US. It’sd absurd to say that it isn’t distributed because there’s no audience for it, because there’s really no way to know – no opne’s really tried to introduce them and see how it would catch on if they tried. I’m certain part of this is as reluctance of the powerrs-that-be to introduce compertition for home-grown material, but somehow popular interest has enabled a lot of Japasnese pop culture to break into surprisingly broad popularity in the US, even against cultural and language differences. You’d think that European things, say, or NZ/Australian ones would make the transition evenb easier – they’rer in English, or in languages that a lot of Americans know. But the only times I’ve ever seen a lot of their movies and TV shows is when I am abroad. The stuff isn’t even available here on DVD or on odd cable channels.\* The thing about “zed” is that it _ought_ to habve diffused across our border more easily than it has – it’s not just UK/Australian/NZ, it’s _Canadian_, or at least used to be. I learned about it when I was a kid from our Canadian neibors. That said, I have to agree that I can’t recall offhand a single case where I heard a character in any UK/Aussie/NZ/Canadian show or movie using “zed” in such a way that it’s obvious that it refers to a letter. Occasuionally it shows up in a name or designation (like Sean Connery’s character in _Zardoz_), but while that may be an obvious reference to people who use that as a regular name for the last letter of the alphabet, to Americans it’s just an odd-sounding name. \*So why IS this the case? That would be an interesting topic for discussion. As I say, I don’t think it’s just “Americansd aren’t interested”. I don’t want to sound sinister or conspiratorial, but I think the gatekeepers of pop culture are , if not working against making this content available, at least not going very far to make it asccessible. If that weren’t the case, then explain the TV broadcast standard zones to me. I can’t believe that American kids wouldn’t watch the recent _Asterix_ films, both live action and especially the animated _Asterix and the Norsemen_, as readily as they have watched other overseas animated fare. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/14 "2013-05-03T11:26:03Z")
CalMeacham, you’ll be happy to know that right here in Kansas, two-year-olds are passionate aboot Canadian television shows. This is mainly due to chance – one of the two basic cable networks directed at them (Sprout) happens to have aboot half of its content from Canada – surely this is just due to how the network happened to be founded or something. So, my two-year-old son calls baseball bats “hockey sticks,” and any animal with horns is a “moose.” I kid you not! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/15 "2013-05-03T11:55:38Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > CalMeacham, you’ll be happy to know that right here in Kansas, two-year-olds are passionate aboot Canadian television shows. This is mainly due to chance – one of the two basic cable networks directed at them (Sprout) happens to have aboot half of its content from Canada – surely this is just due to how the network happened to be founded or something. > > So, my two-year-old son calls baseball bats “hockey sticks,” and any animal with horns is a “moose.” I kid you not! Good to know, but that’s only because a very few Canadian shows show up on US cable. In an ideal world, your kids would also have the option of watching Doctor Who-esque Time Travel shows from New Zealand. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/16 "2013-05-03T12:05:50Z")
Actually, I don’t believe they _do_ pronounce it “zed”; they’re just pulling our legs. Because if they really did pronounce it that way, that would be silly. “Zee” seems to fit better with the rest of the alphabet, following the pattern of almost all the other consonants (besides H, Q, and W), whose names are the sounds they make preceded or followed by a vowel sound. There’s a Staff Report on [Why do the British pronounced the letter Z “zed”?](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1632/why-do-the-british-pronounced-the-letter-z-zed) which I find unsatisfying (even aside from the fact that it has some extraneous paragraph breaks). “‘Zed’ comes from the original Greek zeta,” it explains; yet we don’t pronounce the letter B analogously as “bed.” Still, it’s given me the idea to start pronouncing the letter Z as “uzzard” and see if that catches on. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 12:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/17 "2013-05-03T12:12:08Z")
Personally as an American, the two things that “Zed” makes me think of is “someone’s name” and "slang for ‘zombie’ " ---
**Author:** ![FoieGrasIsEvil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foiegrasisevil/32/16638_2.png) [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/18 "2013-05-03T12:13:31Z")
I discovered it a couple years ago watching _Top Gear_ when Jeremy Clarkson referred to the new flagship Corvette as the “Zed R 1”. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 12:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/19 "2013-05-03T12:17:49Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Good to know, but that’s only because a very few Canadian shows show up on US cable. In an ideal world, your kids would also have the option of watching Doctor Who-esque Time Travel shows from New Zealand. Agreed, but this is getting rather moot…whenever my two-year-old get his hands on my Iphone, he scrolls through Ukrainian train videos, Thai cartoons, and Bolivian children’s songs in minutes. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 12:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399/20 "2013-05-03T12:22:32Z")
I looked in a large video rental shop in California for European films, e.g. one of the Federico Fellini greats – I found a single shelf. Even if you think European films are no better than American films, they have very _different_ style, so should have a market if only for the variety – yet are almost unknown in the U.S.A. One of the more reprehensible actions taken by U.S. during WTO negotiations was (on behalf of Disney etc.) to forbid governments (like Poland’s) from subsidizing their film industries. The rationale was so hypocritical as to nauseate – the prohibition on national film subsidies was _to promote diversity_. :dubious: :smack: Yes, Americans are culturally isolated. I ask those who deny this to tell us if they even have a passport. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-americans-really-unaware-the-letter-z-is-pronounced-zed-in-the-uk-australia-nz/657399.md?page=2)