Ezh (letter)

Ezh (Ʒ ʒ) /ˈɛʒ/, also called the "tailed z", is a letter whose lower case form is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example: vision /ˈvɪʒən/. It is pronounced as the "s" in "treasure" or the "si" in the word "precision". (See also Ž, the Persian alphabet letter ژ and the Cyrillic ж.)

Ezh is also used as a letter in some orthographies of Skolt Sami, both by itself, and with a caron (Ǯ ǯ). These denote partially voiced alveolar and post-alveolar affricates, respectively, broadly represented /dz/ and /dʒ/. It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, for example in the Aja language of Benin and the Dagbani language of Ghana, where the uppercase variant looks like a reflected sigma (Σ).

As a phonetic symbol, ezh originates with Isaac Pitman's English Phonotypic Alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. The symbol is based on medieval cursive forms of Latin z, evolving into the blackletter z letter. In Unicode, however, the blackletter z (“tailed z”, German geschwänztes Z) is considered a glyph variant of z, and not an ezh.

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