Z vs Zed

[GingerOfTheNorth]

[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
The expression isn’t all that common, but the few times I’ve heard someone in Australia or NZ use it, they have indeed said they were “Catching some Zeds”.
[/QUOTE]

Canadians will say (in my experience) “zees”.

[4.66]

@chowder

OK fess up, how do you do that AE joined together.
I also wanna know how to type 1/2 in tiny font

To expand on panamajack’s answer, typing &#189­; in the editor will produce ½ when submitted or previewed (note that hex00BD=dec189).
Likewise typing &#198­; produces Æ.

See this list for other more characters.

[tomndebb]

On a PC:
Æ = Alt + 0198
æ = Alt + 0230
and the name of the letter is ash.

[tomndebb]

The difference between the Alt + answers and the &# answers is where they are employed. To insert characters into HTML, use the “&#four-digit-number” characters. To enter them on a page, here, while keying, use “Alt + four-digit-number”

[Johanna]

[QUOTE=Etumretniw]
And in Swedish- among others.

As for the OP’s question - don’t know if it’s important or not, but in Swedish (and, I would suspect some other European languages as well) theer is no Z sound. Sure, we have it in the alfabet, but we pronounce the letter “seta”, and the letter S “ES”.
So the word ZOO for example would be pronounced SOO in swedish.
Maybe that had a bigger impact on brittish english, which would explain the need to make it stand out more from the letter C. C and Z (pronounced zee) sounds pretty much the same, in my ears.
[/QUOTE]

You mean, from the time when the Danes occupied England?

[Siam_Sam]

This in Cecil’s latest column:

“The Etruscans borrowed the Greek alphabet about 700 BC. They retained the letter order but dispensed with the Semitic-derived letter names, which is why we say ‘ay, bee,’ not ‘alpha, beta.’ (British zed, from zeta, is a holdout.)”

[Jamaika_a_jamaikaiake]

Furthermore, this pattern may be as old as 1846

According to Sociolinguistic Theory, 2nd Ed., J. K. Chambers (p207):

In southern Ontario, the southernmost part of Canada and also the most populous, the proximity of the United States on three sides makes the American presence a constant factor, and one that Canadians feel compelled to resist in order to keep their autonomy. Their resistance involves matters both large and small.

One of the small matters is the name of the last letter of the alphabet. Z is called “zed” everywhere in the world, not only in the English language but also in French, German, and other languages that use the alphabet, except in the United States, whee it is called “zee.” Hence “zee” is an American shibboleth.

In southern Ontario, the pronunciation of Z as “zee” is stigmatized, as might be expected. American immigrants to the region, numbering several hundred annually, routinely report that their name for Z is one of the first things they change after arriving there, because calling it “zee” unfailingly draws comments from the people they are talking to.

Nevertheless, some children in southern Ontario learn the American name and use it for several years. Lexical surveys in the region repeatedly show a higher proportion of young people with “zee” that older people. In a Toronto survey in 1979, two-thirds of 12-year-olds completed their recitation of the alphabet with “zee” but only 8 percent of the adults did. In 1991, when those 12-year-olds were 25, another survey showed that 39 percent of 20 to 25-year-olds said “zee.” Obviously, a large number of them had changed their pronunciation in the interval, but it is also obvious that even more of them would eventually change, because only 12.5 percent of the people over 30 in the same survey said “zee.”

The pattern of declining use of “zee” as people grow older repeats itself in succeeding generations in southern Ontario. Its high frequency in the speech of young people does not persist, as it would if the standard name were changing from “zed” to “zee.” Instead of marking a change in progress, the high frequency decreases as the generation grows older. It is therefore as example of an age-graded change.

After some speculation about the influence of Sesame Street and The Alphabet Song, as well as a note about a letter to the editor in 1846 complaining about young people saying “zee,” Chamber concludes:

Even today, newspaper stories regularly spread mild alarm in their southern Ontario readers with stories reporting the high frequency of “zee” among schoolchildren and inferring from that the spcter of American domination. It is a story that can be written over and over again, generation after generation, unless the newspaper readers come to understand the sociolinguistic difference between a change in progress and an age-graded change. Since that does not seem imminent, newspaper reporters will no doubt keep on assigning the story to cub reporters any time they face a slow news day.

[Siam_Sam]

I enjoy saying “zed” myself. It sounds so quaint.

[zagloba]

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
At the end of the alphabet lived a letter named Zed
A poor silibant, barely kept his family fed
All day on the porch he would sip a cup of tea
And then he decided, “I’ll change my name to Zee!”

– with apologies to Earl Scruggs
[/QUOTE]

Very good

But there’s little need to apologize to Earl: the lyrics were written by Paul Henning, the Hillbillies producer, and sung by Lester Flatt, Earl’s partner.

[Ignatz]

Without reading all of the posts to see if anyone else reports this, the French also pronounce it zed (following dooblevey, eeks and ygrek).