(lowercase , Ezh) is a character in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative. It is also called the tailed z. Example: vision .

As a phonetic symbol, originates with Isaac Pitman's alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. Medieval cursive forms of Latin z, evolving into the blackletter z letter, are very similar in appearance. For purposes of electronic text encoding, however, the latter is considered a glyph variant of z, and not an ezh. (However, Middle High German has , a z with a hook much smaller than that on ezh, that is distinct from both z and .)

is used as a letter in some orthographies of Skolt Sami, both by itself, and with a caron (). These denote partially voiced alveolar () and post-alveolar () affricates. It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, e.g. the Aja language of Benin and the Daghbani language of Ghana, where the uppercase variant looks like a reflected Σ.

Ezh and Yogh

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In Unicode 1.0 the character was unified with the unrelated character yogh ( ), which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Genetically, is derived from Latin z, while is derived from Latin g. The characters do look very similar, and do not appear alongside each other in any alphabet. To better differentiate between and , the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society extend the uppermost tip of the 'yogh' into a little curvature upward.

Ezh and the digit three

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The capital looks similar to the common form of the digit 3. To differentiate between the two characters, the "3" is usually curved, while is written as a combination of a "zigzag" and a tail.

Still, there is a slightly different form of the Arabic numeral 3 called "banker's 3" which looks just like the Ezh. Its origin is that bankers did not want forgers to turn the "3's" in a cheque into "8's", for which reason the top is angled.

External links

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• On the derivation of Yogh and Ezh

Uncommon Latin letters | Phonetic transcription symbols

Ej (lizherenn) | Ezh | Ʒ | エッジュ | Ʒ