In England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, India, Canada (usually), and New Zealand, Z is pronounced as zed. It's derived from the Greek letter zeta.
Zee is the American way of saying the letter z. Zed is the British way. Neither is right or wrong, and nobody is ignorant for pronouncing z the way they do. The zed pronunciation is older, and it more closely resembles the Greek letter, zeta, from which the English letter is derived.
Origin of Zee, Zed
According to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition), the word zed is derived from the French word for the same letter, zède, as well as from the Latin and Greek word for the letter zeta. There were many historic names for the letter Z, including zad, zard, ezed, ezod, izod, izzard and uzzard.
In short, the British pronounce “Z” as /zɛd/ (zed) whereas Americans pronounce it as /ziː/ (zee). Note that the same pronunciation is naturally used also in the plural: the plural of “Z”, denoted “Zs”, “Z's” or “z's”, is pronounced as /zɛdz/ (zedz) in the UK and /ziːz/ (zeez) in the US.
Dictionaries give 'Aitch' as the standard pronunciation for the letter H but 'Haitch' is increasingly being used all across the country.
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, analogous to the ...
When a Z or a ZZ appear in a word in German and Italian, they do not exactly sound like the English Z. In fact they sound a bit closer to TZ or TS, and we approximate that into our speech as a TZ or TS. That is why we pronounce them that way, because they are borrowed! We borrow a lot of words from other languages.
Even unusual letters like Z and J are silent in words that we have adopted from foreign languages, such as marijuana (originally a Spanish word) and laissez-faire (French). But as Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out, one unusual letter is never silent: the letter V.
So Americans use Z's because of nineteenth century dictionaries, while British people use S's because they're asserting their national identity.
When making the S and Z sounds, air is pushed down the center of your tongue and between the tip of your tongue and your top teeth. The movement of the air makes the S and Z sounds. The S sound is a hissing sound like a snake. The Z sound is like the sound of buzzing bees.
The /z/ is a sound from the 'Consonants Pairs' group and it is called the 'Voiced alveolar sibilant'. This means that you create friction through clenched teeth by directing air flow with the tip of th tongue.
The rarest letters in English are j, q, x, and z.
Why did Z get removed from the alphabet? Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed Z from the alphabet. His justification was that Z had become archaic: the pronunciation of /z/ had become /r/ by a process called rhotacism, rendering the letter Z useless.
Australia uses English, very similar to the English, and consequently uses s rather than z on those relevant words.
Not anytime soon. Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed Z from the Latin alphabet. It was returned about 200 years later for words taken from Greek.
Haitch is logical but not socially acceptable. Again history plays its part. In Australia the haitch pronunciation has been linked with Irish Catholics, the Marist Brothers in particular, although no real research has been done into this and it may well be hearsay or at best circumstantial.
'Haitch' (the thinking goes) has no place in proper Australian English: it's a feature of some varieties of Irish English, was brought to Australia by Irish Catholic educators in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, and serves as a marker of Irish Catholic education.
First, you won't find 'haitch' in the dictionary, only the correct spelling aitch. The name of the letter comes from Old French ache of the 1500s and first spelt so in English, when it was related to the Old English word ache, from æce. At this time it was pronounced "ache" or "aitch".
There are four letters which we don't use any more ('thorn', 'eth', 'ash' and 'wynn') and two letters which we use but which the Anglo-Saxons didn't ('j' and 'v'). Until the late Old and early Middle English period, they also rarely used the letters 'k', 'q' and 'z'.
No other single letter in the automotive industry packs as much history, success, passion, and performance as M, something that's clearly evident in BMW's own tagline: “M. The most powerful letter in the world.”
Ezh (Ʒ ʒ) /ˈɛʒ/, also called the "tailed z", is a letter whose lower case form is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant.
Similar to the visual cue for the /s/ sound, place your index fingers at the corner of your mouth when you make the /z/ sound and pull them back towards your ears as your mouth stretches to make the sound. Encourage your child to do the same each time he pronounces the sound.