Everyone’s talking about... The A to Z of...Z

FIRMS including Samsung and Zurich Insurance are dropping the letter Z from their branding after its use by Russian troops invading Ukraine – making it ‘the new swastika’ for some. So what do we know about this alphabetical tailender?

The letter’s origins lie in weaponry. It stems from the ancient letter ‘zayin’, which also means ‘sword’ in Phoenician. It mutated through the Greek zeta to the Latin Z. In about 300BC, Roman censor Appius Claudius Caecus did away with it, declaring it redundant. But it was restored 200 years later for words Latin had taken from Greek. When printing came to Scotland, the letter ‘z’ replaced the similar-looking Middle Scots letter ‘yogh’, pronounced like a hard ‘g’. That’s why the name ‘Menzies’ is pronounced ‘mingus’. But ‘Z’ does not exist in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

We barely use it either!

No, it represents just 0.08 per cent of the letters we write (in contrast to E’s 13 per cent). It’s used more often in the US thanks to the -ize suffix. Some see words such as ‘organize’ as crass Americanisms – but the Oxford English Dictionary prefers that spelling. In King Lear, Shakespeare refers to the uselessness of the letter in an insult hurled at a servant: ‘Thou whoreson Z, thou unnecessary letter.’

It represents anything from the third dimension of space to GMT in military timekeeping to the generation born between 1997 and 2012. And how else would cartoons indicate snoring without the onomatopoeic ‘zzzzz’? In the late 1990s, no imageconscious product would launch without a final ‘z’ to try to sound hip, although ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ was well ahead of that marketing curve.

And Z is a neat end to the alphabet.

But it hasn’t always been. In the early 1800s, children were taught the alphabet had 27 letters, ending with the ampersand… &.