In England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, India, Canada (usually), and New Zealand, Z is pronounced as zed. It's derived from the Greek letter zeta.
Australians call the letter “Z” as “Zed.” The same thing New Zealanders call it and the English.
Australia uses English, very similar to the English, and consequently uses s rather than z on those relevant words.
Saying the Alphabet ?
We say all the letters of the alphabet the same in British English and American English except for Z. In British English we say Zed. In American English we say Zee.
Origin of Zee, Zed
According to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition), the word zed is derived from the French word for the same letter, zède, as well as from the Latin and Greek word for the letter zeta. There were many historic names for the letter Z, including zad, zard, ezed, ezod, izod, izzard and uzzard.
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, analogous to the ...
It's only in American English that it's pronounced as zee, with Candian English sometimes being the exception, depending on which option the speaker prefers. Zee became the standard way to pronounce Z in the United States in the 19th century.
When a Z or a ZZ appear in a word in German and Italian, they do not exactly sound like the English Z. In fact they sound a bit closer to TZ or TS, and we approximate that into our speech as a TZ or TS. That is why we pronounce them that way, because they are borrowed! We borrow a lot of words from other languages.
When making the S and Z sounds, air is pushed down the center of your tongue and between the tip of your tongue and your top teeth. The movement of the air makes the S and Z sounds. The S sound is a hissing sound like a snake. The Z sound is like the sound of buzzing bees.
In short, the British pronounce “Z” as /zɛd/ (zed) whereas Americans pronounce it as /ziː/ (zee). Note that the same pronunciation is naturally used also in the plural: the plural of “Z”, denoted “Zs”, “Z's” or “z's”, is pronounced as /zɛdz/ (zedz) in the UK and /ziːz/ (zeez) in the US.
In 1972, Australians had to learn a new way to describe the weather, when the Bureau of Meteorology changed to the metric system. This ABC News report explains the change in terms such as 'fahrenheit', to degrees 'celcius'.
Mobile phones
Within Australia, mobile phone numbers begin with 04 or 05 – the Australian national trunk code" 0, plus the mobile indicator 4 or 5 – followed by eight digits.
Not anytime soon. Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed Z from the Latin alphabet. It was returned about 200 years later for words taken from Greek.
Like American English, Canadian English prefers -ize endings whenever British usage allows both -ise (the Cambridge model) and -ize spellings (the Oxford model) (e.g. realize, recognize).
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.
Even unusual letters like Z and J are silent in words that we have adopted from foreign languages, such as marijuana (originally a Spanish word) and laissez-faire (French). But as Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out, one unusual letter is never silent: the letter V.
Ƶ (minuscule: ƶ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from Z with the addition of a stroke through the centre.
し and じ consist of the Japanese consonants [ɕ] representing the sound of the roman letter /sh/ and [ʑ] representing the sound of the roman letter /z/ together with the Japanese vowel [i].
A: Our style guide favours “okay” in more formal settings (and when writing dialogue), however in most other situations “OK” is also perfectly okay. It's even okay to use “O.K.” – but just be consistent with the two-letter form (i.e. always use OK or always use O.K. – don't chop and change).
In Australia, it is popular to interchange "zero" for "o" when stating a phone number.
No “Y all” is definitely only used in America. But in Australia, some people say “youse”, which they think is a plural of “you” when talking to two or more people.
Can you name the 27th letter of the alphabet? Well, of course not, there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. But not always; once there were 27.
Why did Z get removed from the alphabet? Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed Z from the alphabet. His justification was that Z had become archaic: the pronunciation of /z/ had become /r/ by a process called rhotacism, rendering the letter Z useless.
There are four letters which we don't use any more ('thorn', 'eth', 'ash' and 'wynn') and two letters which we use but which the Anglo-Saxons didn't ('j' and 'v'). Until the late Old and early Middle English period, they also rarely used the letters 'k', 'q' and 'z'.