The Ezh reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Ezh

Ezh (capital Ʒ, lowercase ʒ) is a character in the IPA alphabet: . Also called the Tailed Z, it is a voiced postalveolar fricative. (SAMPA: /Z/)

Ezh is used for the 's' sound in words like pleasure: ['plɛʒəɹ] (SAMPA: /"pleZ@r/)

In Unicode 1.0 the character was mistakenly unified with the quite different character Yogh, which was not added to Unicode until Unicode 4.0. Ezh as a letter does not appear in any written language, current or historical: Yogh was used in the old English alphabet.

Ezh must not be confused with Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ): Ezh resembles a 'Z' with a tail, while Yogh resembles a Arabic numeral 3 which is placed partially below the baseline. To differentiate between ezh and yogh further, the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society extend the uppermost tip of the 'yogh' 3 into a little curvature upward.

Ezh is similar in appearance to the 'z' glyph as was used in the German Fraktur script, but it is a different character.

This is the "Ezh" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.