has its origin in Czech orthography of the Hussite period.) can also appear with diacritical marks, namely and , which are used to represent the sounds and . They also appear in the digraphs ( or ) and ( or ). Hungarian uses in the digraphs (expressing , as opposed to the value of , which is ), and (expressing ). The letter on its own represents . In Modern Scots is used in place of the obsolete letter (yogh) and should be pronounced as a hard 'g'. Whilst there are a few common nouns which use in this manner, such as (pronounced 'brulgey' meaning broil), z as a yogh substitute is more common in people's names and place-names. Often the names are mispronounced to follow the apparent English spelling so Mackenzie is commonly pronounced with a 'z' sound. Menzies, however, still retains the correct pronunciation of 'Mingus'. Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, usually stands for , such as in Azerbaijani, Igbo, Indonesian, Shona, Swahili, Tatar, Turkish, and Zulu. represents in Northern Sami and Inari Sami. In Turkmen, represents . In the Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki, and Hepburn romanisations of Japanese, stands for a phoneme whose allophones include and . Additionally, in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki systems, is used to represent that same phoneme before , where it's pronounced . Other systems A graphical variant of is , which has been adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative. Uses of Z as a symbol In mathematics, is used to denote the set of integers. Originally, was just a handwritten version of the bold capital Z used in printing but, over time, it has come to be used more frequently in printed works too. It geometry, z is used to denote the third axis in Cartesian coordinates when representing 3-dimensional space. In chemistry, the letter Z is used to denote the Atomic number of an element (number of protons), such as Z=3 for Lithium. In electrical engineering, Z is used to denote electrical impedance. In astronomy, z is a dimensionless quantity representing redshift. The Z boson is a particle in nuclear physics. Z has been used as a military symbol by Russian forces during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian civilians have used it in support of their government. Related characters Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet Z with