The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin, which meant "weapon" or "sword". It represented either the sound / z/ as in English and French, or possibly more like / dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).

Ti Alkire & Carol Rosen, Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61. German letter regarded as a ligature of long s (ſ) and short s, called scharfes S or Eszett. (In some typefaces and handwriting styles it is rather a ligature of long s and tailed z (ſʒ).) Michael Chugani (2014-01-04). "又中又英——Mispronunciations are prevalent in Hong Kong". Headline Daily. Archived from the original on 2017-04-27 . Retrieved 2017-04-26. Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, ⟨z⟩ usually stands for [z], such as in Azerbaijani, Igbo, Indonesian, Shona, Swahili, Tatar, Turkish, and Zulu. ⟨z⟩ represents [ d͡z] in Northern Sami and Inari Sami. In Turkmen, ⟨z⟩ represents [ ð]. The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician Zayin ( ), and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it zeta, a new name made in imitation of eta (η) and theta (θ).The letter Z was borrowed from the Greek Zeta, most likely to represent the sound / t͡s/. At c. 300 BC, Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor, removed the letter Z from the alphabet [ examples needed] , allegedly due to his distaste for the letter, in that it "looked like the tongue of a corpse". A more likely explanation is the sound had disappeared from Latin, making the letter useless for spelling Latin words. It is also thought due to rhotacism, Z became a trilled R sound, / r/. Whatever the case may be, Appius Claudius' distaste for the letter Z is today credited as the reason for its removal. A few centuries later, after the Roman Conquest of Greece, Z was again borrowed to spell words from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek.

It represents / ʒ/ in words like seizure. More often, this sound appears as ⟨su⟩ or ⟨si⟩ in words such as measure, decision, etc. In all these words, / ʒ/ developed from earlier / zj/ by yod-coalescence. Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

7-letter words that start with z

x ˉ \bar x x ˉ is the sample mean, i.e., x ˉ = ( x 1 + . . . + x n ) / n \bar x = (x_1 + ... + x_n) / n x ˉ = ( x 1 ​ + ... + x n ​ ) / n;