It has been suggested that this practice was introduced by primary-school teachers in order to make the acquisition of literacy easier for young pupils by including the sound indicated by the letter in the name of the letter itself (as with áha).įootball fans will probably have noticed that the England captain, Harry Kane, is affectionately referred to by his teammates, all of them under 40, as “Haitch”. But now it is increasingly common in England, too, for the letter to be pronounced as “haitch” by younger people. There is a long history in Ireland of H being called “haitch” in Catholic schools and “aitch” in the Protestant tradition. This corresponded to Old French ache and Italian acca, from Late Latin áha – where the actual sound of the letter is indicated in its name. Its English name, “aitch”, was originally ache in Mediaeval English. It was seemingly at one time commonly pronounced “jye” in England also. Elsewhere in Britain and Ireland it is pronounced “jay”, so as to rhyme with K, the letter which follows it. In Scotland it is very frequently pronounced “jye”, rhyming with I, the letter which precedes it in the alphabet. The letter J also has different pronunciations in different parts of the English-speaking world. The form in Portuguese is zê, which resembles American zee in not containing a d or t. It is called zeta in modern Italian, zäta in Swedish, zæt in Danish, zet The Ancient Greek word itself came from the name of the Phoenician letter zayin, which literally meant “sword, weapon”.Īnother now obsolete English name for the letter was izzard, uzzard, izzet, or izzart. Many of the 18th- and 19th-century continental European-origin immigrant Americans, not having had generations of English-language tradition behind them, might simply not have known what the letter was called and made an intelligent, if incorrect, guess on the basis of the names of the letters B, C, D, E, G, P, T and V.īearing in mind that rhyme helps children to learn the alphabet when this is done by the typical school-room method of reciting it out loud, calling the letter zee does also have the beneficial result of making the name rhyme with these other letters rather than standing out on its own.Īs for the origin of the letter’s name, zed comes from the Ancient Greek letter zeta (pronounced “dzeta”), which was borrowed into Latin as zeta and then became French zède. But the American usage could also in part have been reinforced by the fact that a majority of Americans are not descendants of native speakers of English. It’s origins can be traced back to an Egyptian Hieroglyph which looked like the Proto-Sinaitic version, which meant sword or weapon.There is some evidence that the name of the letter could be zee in England, too, in earlier times it was certainly current in the USA in the late 17th century. The letter Z has had a number of different forms in different alphabets: The name zee is comes from an English dialectal form of the 17th century, and rhymes with other letter names, like bee, cee, dee, etc.Īnother dialectal name for this letter from the 18th century is izzard, which possibly comes from the Occitan izèda or the French ézed. The name zed comes from the Greek name for the letter Ζ ζ zeta (ζήτα). The letter Z is known as zed in the UK, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, and as zee in American English.
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