Zhe (Cyrillic)


Zhe is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiced palato-alveolar sibilant , or the somewhat similar voiced retroflex sibilant , like the pronunciation of in "treasure".
Zhe is romanized as or.

History

It is not known how the character for Zhe was derived. No similar letter exists in Greek, Latin or any other alphabet of the time, though there is some graphic similarity with its Glagolitic counterpart Zhivete which represents the same sound. However, the origin of Zhivete, like that of most Glagolitic letters, is unclear. One possibility is that it was formed from two connecting Hebrew letters Shin, the bottom one inverted.
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet the name of Zhe was , meaning "live".
Zhe was not used in the Cyrillic numeral system.

Usage

Zhe is used in the alphabets of all Slavic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet, and of most non-Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The position in the alphabet and the sound represented by the letter vary from language to language.
LanguagePosition in
alphabet		Represented soundRomanization
Belarusian8thvoiced retroflex fricative ž
Bulgarian7thvoiced postalveolar fricative zh
Macedonian8thvoiced postalveolar fricative zh
Russian8thvoiced retroflex fricative zh
Serbian8thvoiced postalveolar fricative ž
Ukrainian9thvoiced postalveolar fricative zh
Uzbek 8thvoiced postalveolar affricate or voiced postalveolar fricative j
Mongolian8thvoiceless postalveolar affricate j
Kyrgyz8thvoiced postalveolar affricate j
Dungan8thvoiced retroflex fricative r
other non-Slavic languagesvoiced postalveolar fricative

Zhe can also be used in Leet speak or faux Cyrillic in place of the letter, or to represent the symbol of the rap duo Kris Kross.

Transliteration

Ж is most often transliterated as the digraph for English-language readers. In linguistics and for Central European readers, it is most often transliterated as, with a háček. The scientific transliteration convention comes from Czech spelling and is also used in the Latin alphabets of several other Slavic languages. Thus, Leonid Brezhnev's surname could be transliterated as "Brežnev", as it is spelled in a number of Slavic languages. Polish uses its own convention for transliteration of Cyrillic according to which ж is transliterated with the Polish letter ż. Ж is often transliterated in Mongolian because of its pronunciation as.

Related letters and other similar characters