Meet the “Z” family of words…Zeta, Zelda, Zara, Zack, Zee and Zed

Z is the twenty-sixth and not-always-lucky last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet and other western European languages. It is most commonly pronounced zed, as used in international English. But in the US, and sometimes in Canadian and Caribbean English, the preference is for zee. A third, archaic variant pronounces the letter “Z” as izzard, whose usage today is confined to Hong Kong English and Cantonese. “Z” derives from the Greek letter zeta, reaching English via the customary pathway of Latin. The ancient Greek “Z” was a close copy of the Phoenician_alphabet”>Phoenician Zayin (I) (meaning “weapon” or “sword”). Around 300 BC, Roman censor Appius Claudius Caecus relegated the letter Z to the ancient history archives, striking it from the alphabet allegedly due to his distaste for the letter, owing to it “looking like the tongue of a corpse”🅐.

Zabernism: misuse or abuse of military authority; bullying [From the German name for Saverne, a town in Alsace involving a 1913 incident of an overzealous soldier who wounded a cobbler for laughing at him, ultimately triggering an intervention from the army who took over the power from local authorities]

Zaftig: having a full, rounded figure; pleasingly plump (esp of a woman) [Yiddish. zaftik, (“juicy” or “succulent”) from zaft, (“juice” or “sap”)]

Zatch: female genitalia [? uncertain, slang term possibly based on the colloquial word “snatch” for the female organ — cf. “rosebud”; “yoni”, etc, etc]

Zebrinny: what you get when you cross a stallion (male horse) with a female zebra [blend of “zebra”, from Old Galician Port. enzebro, ezebra, azebra (“wild ass”) + “hinny”, from L. hinnus – possibly cognate with hinnire (“to whinny”)] (cf. Zorse: offspring of an equine mare’s congress with a male zebra)

Zeitgeist: (perhaps doesn’t quality for this list on the criterion of obscurity as it has become quite a trendy word in academe and among the “twitterati”, but its popular and topical usage has overstretched and distorted (or downsized) its meaning **see “The Incredible Shrinking Zeitgeist: How Did This Great Word Lose Its Meaning?”, Katy Waldman, Slate, 06-Jul-2015, www.slate.com)**…so here goes anyway!) a broad definition of the term concerns what’s going on artistically, culturally, religiously or intellectually within a given epoch; perhaps “the defining spirit or mood of a particular age” captures its essence more completely [Ger. zeit (“time”) + –geist (“spirit” or “ghost”)]

Zephyr: a soft, gentle breeze; a light or west wind 🌬️ [from Zephyrus, the Greek god or personification of the west wind]

Zoanthropy: (Psychiatry) the delusion that one is an animal [Gk. zo-, zôion (“animal”) + –anthropy (“human”; “man”) (cf. Lycanthropy)

Zob: a worthless or good-for-nothing person; a fool [origin uncertain but one contention is it derives from Fr. zob (“dick”; “cock”), itself deriving from Arabic ⁩ (zubb)]

Zoonosis: any disease passed from animals to humans [Zo- + -nosos (“disease”)]

Zooscopy: (also Zoopsia) the scientific observation of animals ; (Psychiatry) hallucination that one is seeing animals [Gk. zoo + –skopéō, (“to see”)]

Zwischenzug: chess move made to play for time (cf. Zugzwang: chess blockade) [Ger. from zwischen (“between”) + -zug (“move”)]

Zygodactyl: (of a bird) having two toes pointing forward and two pointing backwards [Gk. zygo (“yoke”; “yoke-shaped”) + –dáktylos (“finger”)] (cf. Zygal: formed like the letter H; of, like or pertaining to a yoke or union)

Zymologist: a scientist who studies chemical fermentation [Gk. zym from zúmē (“ferment”) + -o + -logist]

Zythepsary: a brewery [Gk. zûthos, “barley beer”) + hépsō, (“to boil”)]

🅐 a more likely explanation is that the “z” sound had disappeared from Latin at that time making the letter useless for spelling Latin words…a few centuries later it got a recall to the A(to Z) team

ᘛᘚ°༻༺｡༄༄༄༅༅༅ᘛᘚ༻༺｡༄༄༄༅༅༅༻༻°ᘛᘚ༅༅༻༺°ᘛᘚ

Z done, thus marks the culmination and conclusion of our alphabetical voyage through lexical-land. While merely scratching the surface of what’s out there lexically of an unusual bent, we have encountered a good cross-section of the more obscure, obsolete, curious and odd and sometimes simply weird words and their origins that inhabit the English language. It’s appropriate that at this juncture I should acknowledge my debt to the sources for my little project which have, collectively, provided the drawing board and raw materials for the realisation of this alphabetical compendium.

Of particular aid to my lexiconic quest were:

▫️Phrontistery https://phrontistery.info/ my usual “go-to” reference-point for the majority of entries, an exhaustive repository for sheer volume of unusual, rare and redundant words alone, although the dictionary does not provide word derivations. Definitions are brief

▫️Grandiloquent Dictionary www.islandnet.com/ along similar lines to the Phrontistery but providing a smaller range of words

▫️List of Greek and Latin roots in English (Wikipedia) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ a good point of departure for the root prefix and suffix base classical meanings

▫️Online Etymology Dictionary www.etymologyonline.com/

▫️English-Word Information http://wordinfo.info/ well-organised site with an easy search mechanism and comprehensive definitions

▫️Dictionary.net www.dictionary.net/ similar to previous (E-W I), a search tool with chronological table of changes in the word’s meaning

Some of the other logophilic sites I referred to more sparingly include the following:

▪️World Wide Words www.worldwidewords.org/

▪️Collins Online Dictionary www.collinsdictionary.com/

▪️Luciferous Logolepsy www.arcane.org/

▪️Words and Phrases of the Past www.wordsandphrasesofthepast.com/

▪️Get the Words www.getthewords.com/

▪️Word Nerd www.lawhimsy.com/