Mel Starkings and 85 others like this. The right answer is Q.
The rarest letters in English are j, q, x, and z.
Z (or z) is the 26th and last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed (/ˈzɛd/) and zee (/ˈziː/), with an occasional archaic variant izzard (/ˈɪzərd/).
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.
Until 1835, the English Alphabet consisted of 27 letters: right after "Z" the 27th letter of the alphabet was ampersand (&). The English Alphabet (or Modern English Alphabet) today consists of 26 letters: 23 from Old English and 3 added later.
Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524.
But it's also used in almost every English-speaking country. 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.
Outside Russia, the symbol has been banned from public display in various countries. The "Z" symbol has been pejoratively called a zwastika or zwaztika, in reference to the Nazi swastika, or pejoratively in Russian and Ukrainian as "ziga" (Russian: зига) in reference to Sieg Heil.
The letter 'O' is unchanged in shape since its adoption in the Phoenician alphabet c. 1300BC. Information from Archives (e.e. 1996).
However, according to Hoax Slayer, all of this is simply an on-going prank that has gone on for years, and has been taken totally out of context. The ELCC actually doesn't exist. Which means Z is definitely not getting removed from the English language — your zippers and zealous zebras are A-OK.
Q's pairing with U is a Latin invention that has its origin in Greek. The letter Koppa, which Q is based on, would appear before a rounded vowel where otherwise a sound like /k/ or /g/ would be used. But, a few other letters, like C, also designated the same sound but in different letter combinations.
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.
The letter 'I' was called 'yod' in 1000 BC. It meant hand and arm. The Greeks called it 'iota' and made it vertical. In its evolution, it turned into a straight line around 700 BC.
В в sounds like “v” in “van” or “voice”, З з sounds like “z” in “zoo” or “zodiac”, Н н sounds like “n” in “no” or “noon”, Р р sounds like “r” in “run” or “rest” (but rolled).
flivver /ˈflɪvɚ/ (fli-vr) is an outdated American slang term used for a small car that gave a rough ride. divvy /ˈdɪvi/ (div-ee) is a slang term meaning “to divide”. Derived expressions are “divvies”, “divvying”, and “divvied”.
'Ta' means 'thank you'. "A: Can you please pass me the sauce? B: Sure, here you go. A: Ta."
In the course of conversation the tag "eh" is often used merely to check that the person you are talking to is listening and following what you are saying. A mere prefunctory "Yeah" is all that is required in response. Thus the questioning force of "eh" is reduced.
So why is there a dot above the lowercase i and j? This diacritical mark is also called a tittle and it exists to help the reader easily distinguish them from other letterforms.
How did y become j? In Romance languages, the consonantal i, which originally was pronounced in Latin as the consonantal y in English, became a different sound (what sound depended on the language), and in English, influenced by Old French, it was used for the sound the j is now used for.
The letter Z is of uncertain origin. In a very early Semitic writing used in about 1500 bc on the Sinai Peninsula, there often appeared a sign (1) believed by some scholars to mean the same as the sign (2) which was developed beginning in about 1000 bc in Byblos and in other Phoenician and Canaanite centers.