Zhe (Ж ж; italics: ''Ж'' ''ж'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...

. It commonly represents the

voiced retroflex sibilant The voiced retroflex sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is z`. Like all the retro ...

(

listen Listen may refer to: * The action of listening * Central auditory system listening is how the brain processes what you hear * Listening behaviour types in human communication Computing * LISTEN, a TCP connection state on the server side indi ...

). It is also often used with D ( Д) to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter J with a ДЖ combo. Zhe is

romanized Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

as or .

History

It is not known how the character for Zhe was derived. No similar letter exists in

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

or any other alphabet of the time, though there is some graphic similarity with its

Glagolitic The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...

counterpart Zhivete (Image: ) 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. Zhe may also be derived from the Coptic letter ⟨Ϫϫ⟩, supported by the phonetic value ( represents the sound / d͡ʒ/ in Coptic) and shape of the letter, which the Glagolitic counterpart Zhivete resembles even more closely. It may be a ligature, formed from combining two "K" letters (one backward form) sharing a common stem. In the Early Cyrillic alphabet the name of Zhe was (''živěte''), meaning "live" (imperative). Zhe was not used in the

Cyrillic numeral system Cyrillic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th century. It was used in the First Bulgarian Empire and by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in ...

Usage

Zhe is used in the alphabets of all

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...

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. Zhe can also be used in

Leet Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance ...

speak or

faux Cyrillic Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text, usually to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia, though it may be used in other contexts as well. It is a common Western trope u ...

in place of the letter , or to represent the symbol of the rap duo

Kris Kross Kris Kross was an American hip hop duo that consisted of Chris "Mac Daddy" Kelly and Chris "Daddy Mac" Smith. Kris Kross was the youngest hip-hop duo to gain success, with gold and platinum albums at 12 and 13 years old. The duo was discover ...

(a ligature of two back-to-back letter K's).

Transliteration

Ж is most often

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

as the digraph for English-language readers (as in ''

Doctor Zhivago ''Doctor Zhivago'' is the title of a novel by Boris Pasternak and its various adaptations. Description The story, in all of its forms, describes the life of the fictional Russian physician and poet Yuri Zhivago and deals with love and loss during ...

'', Доктор Живаго, or

Georgy Zhukov Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov ( rus, Георгий Константинович Жуков, p=ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪj kənstɐnʲˈtʲinəvʲɪtɕ ˈʐukəf, a=Ru-Георгий_Константинович_Жуков.ogg; 1 December 1896 – ...

, Георгий Жуков). In linguistics and for Central European readers, it is most often transliterated as , with a háček. The

scientific transliteration Scientific transliteration, variously called ''academic'', ''linguistic'', ''international'', or ''scholarly transliteration'', is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script ( romanization). ...

convention comes from Czech spelling and is also used in the Latin alphabets of several other Slavic languages (Slovak, Sorbian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene). Thus,

Leonid Brezhnev Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev; uk, links= no, Леонід Ілліч Брежнєв, . (19 December 1906– 10 November 1982) was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1964 and 1 ...

's surname (Леонид Брежнев) 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 (which is pronounced in Polish) or the digraph . Ж is often transliterated in Mongolian because of its pronunciation as .

Related letters and other similar characters

*Ӂ ӂ : Cyrillic letter Zhe with breve *Ź ź : Latin letter Z with acute *Ž ž : Latin letter Z with caron *Ż ż : Latin letter Z with dot above *J j : Latin letter J - the same sound in Romanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, French, and Portuguese *Ʒ ʒ : Latin letter Ezh

Computing codes

External links

* *{{Wiktionary-inline, ж