Ze (Cyrillic)


Ze is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative, like the pronunciation of in "zebra".
Ze is romanized using the Latin letter.
The shape of Ze is very similar to the Arabic numeral three and the Cyrillic letter E. The new letter is called э.

History and shape

Ze is derived from the Greek letter Zeta.
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was , meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked similar to a Greek or Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom. Though a majuscule form of this variant is encoded in Unicode, historically it was only used as caseless or lowercase.
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Zemlja had a value of 7.
Medieval Cyrillic manuscripts and Church Slavonic printed books have two variant forms of the letter Zemlja: з and. Only the form was used in the oldest ustav writing style; з appeared in the later poluustav manuscripts and typescripts, where the two variants are found at proportions of about 1:1. Some early grammars tried to give a phonetic distinction to these forms, but the system had no further development. Ukrainian scribes and typographers began to regularly use З/з in an initial position, and otherwise. Russian scribes and typographers largely abandoned the widespread use of the variant in favor of з in the wake of Patriarch Nikon's reforms. They still used the older form mostly in the case of two З's in row: .
The civil script knows only one shape of the letter: З/з. However, shapes similar to Z/z can be used in certain stylish typefaces.
In calligraphy and in general handwritten text, lowercase з can be written either fully over the baseline or with the lower half under the baseline and with the loop.

Phonetic value

The letter Ze may represent:

Zhuang

A letter that looks like Cyrillic Ze was used in the Latin Zhuang alphabet from 1957 to 1986 to represent the third tone. In 1986, it was replaced by.

Other related letters and similar characters