Why do Canadians call the last letter of the alphabet zed?

Zed may be part of Canadian identity, but it’s lost popularity since the 1970s

If one thing binds us together as Canadians, it’s how invested we are in being different from Americans.

Few things distinguish us from our neighbours to the south more quickly than calling the last letter of the alphabet zed instead of zee, but why do we do it?

Though zed may feel quintessentially British, the word probably entered English from French.

When the French-speaking Normans conquered England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of the British court. __ For more than three centuries afterward__, English kings grew up speaking French.

During that time, thousands of French words were introduced to the English language, including the French letter name zède, which was borrowed into English as zed.

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Zed’s roots, though, date back even further — over 2,500 years to ancient Greek.

French inherited the word from Latin, its direct ancestor, which called zed by the similar-sounding name zeta. The Romans had picked up both the letter and the name zeta from the Greeks when they adopted the Greek alphabet to write Latin.

Zed remains the name for the letter not just in Canada and the United Kingdom but throughout the Commonwealth, in countries like Australia, South Africa and India.

That makes Americans the odd ones out when it comes to using the name zee, but they didn’t invent the word. It originated in Great Britain.

By the 1500s, a variety of alternate names for zed were in circulation in England, like zard, ezod, izzard, uzzard, and zee. Most of those pronunciations eventually died out, but zee was popular with spelling reformers, probably because it rhymed with other consonants like B, G and T.

One of the advocates for zee was Noah Webster, who published two groundbreaking American English dictionaries in the early 1800s. He popularized many of the spelling differences that distinguish American English from British English to this day, removing the u from colour, shortening tonne to ton and revising centre to center.

Webster’s motives weren’t just pedantic; they were patriotic. Calling himself “the prophet of language to the American people,” he saw his spelling updates as a way not only to align written English with American pronunciation, but also to assert America’s independence from its former English overlords.

“Customs, habits, and language, as well as government should be national,” he wrote in an essay published in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world. Such is the policy of other nations, and such must be our policy, before the states can be either independent or respectable.”

In his 1790 school speller and 1828 dictionary, Webster stipulated that Z should be pronounced zee. Much as contemporary Canadians use zed to separate themselves from Americans, he likely saw the letter as another way for Americans to differentiate themselves from their rivals, the British.

Webster’s spelling book was one of the first used in Canadian schools and — along with The ABC Song, copyrighted in Boston in 1835 — introduced zed to Canadian children, but there was pushback from British loyalists who felt Canadians should speak “the Queen’s English.”

An 1846 letter to the editor of the Kingston Herald complained that “the instructor of youth, who, when engaged in teaching the elements of the English language, direct them to call that letter ze, instead of zed, are teaching them error.”

The same year, Canada West (modern-day Ontario) adopted Irish National Readers as the standard textbook across its schools. The readers were written in British English and trained generations of Canadians to favour Britishisms like zed over Americanisms like zee.

Still, Canadian children haven’t escaped American influence.

We’re more inundated by U.S. media than ever before. For decades kids have been tuning into American educational programs like Sesame Street and Ms. Rachel that teach zee instead of zed, and it has influenced the way we speak.

In 1972, a study showed that up to 77 per cent of English-speaking Canadians said zed, not zee. Fifty years later, barely over half of Canadian adults have a firm preference for zed.

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Affection for zed varies between the provinces. Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan are zed strongholds, while zed is declining in the Maritimes, especially among younger age groups.

Perhaps surprisingly, since N.L. speech is often considered closest to British or Irish English, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are the least likely of all Canadians to say zed.

Even in the 1970s, half of N.L. adults used zee over zed, and today Newfoundland and Labrador is the only province where the majority of people under 30 prefer zee.

That could be, in part, because teachers and books from the United States played a major role in the development of Newfoundland and Labrador’s schools and libraries in the 1800s and early 1900s, and textbooks weren’t standardized early on the way they were in central Canada.

It’s common to find what we would consider American spellings in N.L. newspapers from the nineteenth century.

The large American presence during World War II, when over 100,000 U.S. troops were stationed in St. John’s, Argentia, Gander, Stephenville and Goose Bay, may also have had an effect.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that as English-speaking Canadians get older they tend to ditch zee and start saying zed. If you ask a Canadian over 55 which they use now, they’re more likely to say zed than when they were in school.

That’s probably because for many of us zed really does become a marker of our cultural and national identity, a subtle way to distinguish ourselves as Canadian to anyone who’s listening.