Z (or z) is the 26th and last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed () and zee (), with an occasional archaic variant izzard (). Name and pronunciation In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee , analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc., and deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form. Another English dialectal form is izzard . This dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan or the French , whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta, perhaps a Vulgar Latin form with a prosthetic vowel. Its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese. Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: in Italian, Basque, and Spanish, in Icelandic (no longer part of its alphabet but found in personal names), in Portuguese, in Swedish, in Danish, in Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, and Czech, in German (capitalised as a noun), in Norwegian, in French, in Japanese, and in Vietnamese. Several languages render it as or , e.g. or more rarely in Finnish (sometimes dropping the first t altogether; , or the latter of which is not very commonplace). In Standard Chinese pinyin, the name of the letter Z is pronounced , as in "zi", although the English zed and zee have become very common. In Esperanto the name of the letter Z is pronounced . Under the NATO spelling alphabet, the letter is signified with ZULU, like the Zulu people. History Semitic The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin, which meant "weapon" or "sword". It represented either the sound as in English and French, or possibly more like (as in Italian , ). Greek 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). In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the letter seems to have represented ; in Attic, from the