English and American English have their differences. Tomato, tomato. Sidewalk, pavement. Trunk, boot. Thank God they managed to keep the alphabet the same. Almost.
They must have been kicking themselves when they managed a perfect match, only to come unstuck not on the last letter, but the last sound in the last letter.
It’s a telling example of the importance of paying attention right the way to the end of something, even when you think you already know the answer. How America must be kicking itself now.
Because for all the perfect alignment of the previous 25 letters, when they were delivering ‘Z’ it’s like they went to sleep on the job.
Zzzzeeeeeeeeeee
As we all know, it’s zed, not zee. So, what went wrong, America? Let’s find out.
It turns out there weren’t simply two options in the running. As with all the best stories, there was a rogue third element, and its name was izzard.
That’s right, go back into the yokel dialects of England (and apparently to some far-flung corners of Wyoming or Idaho in more recent times) and you may have heard the final letter of the alphabet pronounced ‘izzard’.
That clears up the derivation of stalwart UK comedian Eddie Izzard’s surname, but it doesn’t untangle the zeds versus zees debate any further.
Zed’s long lineage
We have to go back to the Phoenicians for the semitic letter ‘zayin’, which was later borrowed by the Greeks for their letter ‘zeta’. The link between ‘zeta’ and ‘zed’ is immediately obvious.
But it wasn’t that simple. Zed came to the English via the Romans. But wait! Latin had no zed in its alphabet, just as it had no zero in its number system (another story, for another post).
Nevertheless, the Romans borrowed ‘Z’ and applied it to their ‘ts’ and ‘dz’ sounds. The ‘dz’ sound being the derivation of the French ‘j’ that came to English before the zed did. Most European languages take their word for the letter ‘Z’ from the Greek root ‘zeta’.
And finally, we meander back to 19th century America, where dictionaries began cementing ‘zee’ as the preferred option over ‘zed’, apparently as an alignment of the pronunciation with other letters, such as ‘bee’, ‘cee’, ‘dee’, ‘ee’, ‘pee’ and ‘tee’. As with so many American linguistic treasure hunts, it all comes down to simplicity in the end.
More treasure hunts? How about all the Swedish words in English?