. The earlier form is jealous; its initial sound is the , which developed to Modern French . John Wycliffe wrote the word as or . Z at the end of a word was pronounced ts, as in English assets, from Old French "enough" (Modern French ), from Vulgar Latin ("to sufficiency"). Last letter of the alphabet In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to Z being followed by & when her character Jacob Storey says, "He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see." Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on the end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö, while it is Å for Danish and Norwegian. In the German alphabet, the umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü) and the letter ß (Eszett or scharfes S) are regarded respectively as modifications of the vowels a/o/u and as a (standardized) variant spelling of ss, not as independent letters, so they come after the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with z. Variant and derived forms A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z" (German , also ). In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Ligated with long s (ſ), it is part of the origin of the Eszett (ß) in the German alphabet. The character ezh (Ʒ) resembles a tailed z, which came to be indistinguishable from the yogh (ȝ) in Middle English writing. Unicode assigns codepoints and in the Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively. There is also a variant with a stroke. Pronunciation and use English In modern English orthography, the letter usually represents the sound . It represents in words like seizure. More often, this sound appears as or in words such as measure, decision, etc. In all these words, developed from earlier by yod-coalescence. Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin or end with , though it occurs within other words. It is the least frequently used letter in written English, with a frequency of about 0.08% in words. is