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I recently read a great book about the development of the English alphabet, The Alphabet by David Sacks which answers all of these questions. Off-hand I can't remember the answer as to why the letter names don't follow the same pattern throughout i.e., why we have [bi:] but not [hi:] - something to do with how the letters evolved from Phoenician through Greek to Latin and beyond - but I do remember why we Brits have 'zed' and the Americans zee. Our zed comes from the French 'zede' and entered English during the Middle English period due to the contact with Norman French. It entered French from the Latin 'zeta' which can still be found in modern Spanish and Italian. Mark is right though, and the Romans did indeed get this from the Greek, where it is 'zeta'. The Greeks in turn had borrowed it from the Phoenicians, for whom it was 'zayin', the name which is still used today in modern Hebrew. Before 'z' came to be known as 'zed' in English it had many other names; 'izzard, ezod, zad, zard' to name but a few. 'Zee' is a dialect form which is thought to have been used in England up until the 17th century. It's thought that it was brought to the USA by British immigrants and it stuck. bronwen ps I've just noticed Jim's wikipedia link.... well this is for those of you too lazy to click on the link I guess...... see also http://www.billcasselman.com/cwod_archive/zed.htm for more info too. On 1 Jun 2006, at 14:48, Mark Jones wrote: > Sound reasoning from Karen Chung, but why then not [hi:] for <h>, > [ri:] for /r/, [wi:] for <w> etc.? Is British usage due to Greek > 'zita' maybe? > > Mark > > Mark J. Jones > Department of Linguistics > University of Cambridge > http://kiri.ling.cam.ac.uk/mark/ > [log in to unmask] > > Bronwen G. Evans, Rm G4 Wolfson House, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, 4, Stephenson Way, London, NW1 2HE. Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5003 Fax +44 (0)20 7679 5107 http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/bron