Sozedis British andzeeis American , yes ? Well , that might be the case today , but once upon a time things were quite different . Historically , bothzedandzeewere used fairly much interchangeably in both British and American English , alongside a whole host of other more flakey names for the last ( or rather , secondly last ) varsity letter of the first rudiment , likeizzard , uzzard , zad , shardand , our personal favorite , ezod .
Of the two we ’re speak about here , however , zedis by far the old , and demand its name via French and Latin from that ofits Hellenic tantamount , zeta . Zedfirst appeared in print in the other 1400s , in a mediate English text file that fairly straightforwardly describe it as “ þe laste lettre of þe a B-complex vitamin c”—which is considerably skillful thanwhat William Shakespeare had to say about it . Zee , on the other paw , first appeared in print in a British language textbook — Thomas Lye’sNew Spelling - record book — in 1677 . The namezeeitself is thought to have originated as nothing more than a accent variation ofzed , probably influenced by the regularbee , cee , dee , eepattern of much of the rest of the alphabet . But on the dot how or why it became the predominant course in American English is unclear .
One wide - held theory is that becausezed , as the previous of the two , was the most far-flung variation amongst British English speakers , during the Revolutionary War American English speakers looking to outstrip themselves from anything even vaguely British but take on thezeeversion as their own to make a stand — no matter how small it might seem — against British control . Alternatively , there might n’t have been any political reasoning behind it at all , and the name might plainly have total to the forefront as American English was ram to adapt and simplify as more and more colonist — coming from ever more remote country , and speak an ever more varied regalia of languages — start out arriving in the New World .
Whatever the need might have been , by the mid - nineteenth centuryzeehad become the received strain of the letter of the alphabet Z in the United States , and has remain so ever since . Though the safari to resurrectezodbegins here …
This piece primitively seem on Paul Anthony Jones’Haggard Hawks blog .
