more common in the Oxford spelling of British English than in standard British English, as this variant prefers the more etymologically 'correct' -ize endings, which are closer to Greek, to -ise endings, which are closer to French; however, -yse is preferred over -yze in Oxford spelling, as it is closer to the original Greek roots of words like analyse. The most common variety of English it is used in is American English, which prefers both the -ize and -yze endings. One native Germanic English word that contains 'z', freeze (past froze, participle frozen) came to be spelled that way by convention, even though it could have been spelled with 's' (as with choose, chose and chosen). is used in writing to represent the act of sleeping (often using multiple z's, like zzzz), as an onomatopoeia for the sound of closed-mouth human snoring. Other languages stands for a voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant , in Albanian, Breton, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It stands for in Chinese pinyin and Jyutping, Finnish (occurs in loanwords only), and German, and is likewise expressed in Old Norse. In Italian, it represents two phonemes, and . In Portuguese, it stands for in most cases, but also for or (depending on the regional variant) at the end of syllables. In Basque, it represents the sound . Castilian Spanish uses the letter to represent (as English in thing), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with . Before voiced consonants, the sound is voiced to or , sometimes debbucalized to (as in the surname Guzmán , or ). This is the only context in which can represent a voiced sibilant in Spanish, though also represents (or , depending on the dialect) in this environment. In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, usually stands for the sound /s/ and thus shares the value of ; it normally occurs only in loanwords that are spelt with in the source languages. The letter on its own represents in Polish. It is also used in four of the seven officially recognized digraphs: (), ( or ), ( or , sometimes it represents a sequence ) and (), and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language. (Other Slavic languages avoid digraphs and mark the corresponding phonemes with the (caron) diacritic: , , , ; this system