The grapheme Ž (minuscule: ž) is formed from Latin Z with the addition of caron (, , , ). It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, the sound of English g in mirage, s in vision, or Portuguese and French j. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with , but the lowercase ž is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. In addition, ž is used as the romanisation of Cyrillic ж in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration. For use in computer systems, Ž and ž are at Unicode codepoints U+017D and U+017E, respectively. On Windows computers, it can be typed with Alt+0142 and Alt+0158, respectively. Ž is the last letter of most alphabets that contain it, but exceptions include Estonian, Karelian, Veps, and Turkmen. Origin The symbol originates with the Czech alphabet. In Czech printed books it first appeared in the late 15th century. It evolved from the letter Ż, introduced by the author of the early 15th-century De orthographia Bohemica (probably Jan Hus) to indicate a Slavic fricative not represented in Latin alphabet. The punctus rotundus over was gradually replaced by háček (caron). This orthography later became standard and was popularized by the Bible of Kralice. It was occasionally used for the closely related Slovak language during the period when it lacked a literary norm. From Czech, it was adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830, and then into the Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian and Bosnian alphabets. In addition, it features in the orthographies of the Baltic, some Uralic and other languages. Uses Slavic languages It is the 42nd letter of the Czech, the 46th letter of Slovak, the 25th letter of the Slovenian alphabet, the 30th letter of the Croatian, Bosnian, and the same within the Latinic versions of Serbian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian (as a counterpart or transliteration of Cyrillic Ж in the latter three). It is the 27th letter of the Sorbian alphabet, and it appears in the Belarusian latin alphabet. Occasionally it is used in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian transliterations and even less frequently in Bulgarian transliteration. For most languages it represents a voiced postalveolar fricative except in Russian transliterations of Ж where it represents a voiced retroflex fricative . In Polish, the corresponding letter is Ż/ż. Baltic languages It is the 32nd letter of the Lithuanian and