| Usage 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. The question is on the tin. To the English Redditors. Why is it that the letter “Z” is pronounced “Zed” and why is it that Americans pronounce it “Zee”? ZEE meaning: 1. the last letter of the English alphabet; Z: 2. the last letter of the English alphabet; Z: . Learn more. Thomas Lye in the 1600s wrote a spelling book in England and he pronounced it Zee. (Actually, he wrote "ze" and t is "te" and p is "pe") Here's an interesting quote from the US: 1882 E. A. Freeman in Longman's Mag. I. 94 The name..given to the last letter of the alphabet..in New England is always zee; in the South it is zed. Dr. Adam Crowley, an associate professor of English in Husson University’s College of Science and Humanities, attributes this variation to “regional dialects.” “Between the 1500s and 1700s, the More important is to realize that other English speaking nations tended to be colonized later and under more direct British influence for longer, thus favoring the "official" British pronunciation of Zed (making this one of the easiest ways to identify the difference between a Canadian and an American besides the pronunciation of about). zed. It’s not just the British that pronounce “z” as “zed”. The vast majority of the English speaking world does this. The primary exception, of course, is in the United States where “z” is pronounced “zee”. The British and others pronounce “z”, “zed”, owing to the origin of the letter “z”, the Greek letter “Zeta”. In English zee makes way more sense than zed because zee actually sounds similar to other letters unlike zed which sounds completely different. Reply ThatTurtlesDude • Show activity on this post. The letter 'Z' is called: 'Zed' (/zɛd/) in British English and Commonwealth English (i.e., UK, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, etc.) Note that this is also close to its name in several non-English languages: " zeta in Italian and in Spanish, zäta in Swedish, zet in Dutch, Polish, German, Romanian and Czech bNlfD.

is z pronounced zee or zed