And the 2025 Separated by a Common Language US-to-UK Word of the Year is (sorta kinda):
zee (but mostly Gen Z)
I must start by assuring you: British people generally do not call the letter zee. Nevertheless, I have reasons for choosing zee this year:
- It is winning (particularly among[st] the people it describes) as the pronunciation of the generation name: Gen Z.
- It is a word that comes up when people express worries that British children are "using American words", that perennial clickbait that baited a particularly large number of clicks this year. It started with The Sunday Times commissioning a survey of teachers; the results of that survey were consistently (determinedly) misinterpreted. The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention zee, but it came up often in the interviews I did after it. If you're interested, here's an episode of Lexis podcast where we talk about the survey (and its problems).
- It was also the Americanisms that the YouGov polling organi{s/z}tion chose for the title of its report on Americanism use in Britain in April.
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The results of that poll are informative:
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Essentially: the majority of Britons under 50 report using zee in the name Gen Z, with more than 70% of those under 24 (that is, in Gen Z) saying it. The majority of Britons over 50 say they say Gen-Zed. All age groups, however, say that the alphabet letter 'Z' rhymes with bed at rates above 70%. The younger age groups (versus the older) have more people claiming to say the alphabet with an ex-why-zee at the end, but more people say zed for the letter than say zee for the generation.
That's self-reported data, and self-reports of linguistic behavio(u)rs require corroboration. We can find that corroboration. On YouGlish, you can hear both Gen-Zee and Gen-Zed in British speakers, but it's mostly Gen-Zee, particularly among younger speakers. One of the British speakers (Jessica Kellgren-Fozard) says Gen-Zee most of the time, but does say Gen-Zed at least once in one of her videos—and it wouldn't be surprising if many other speakers are inconsistent in this particular zee/zed. If you search for British people saying zee on Youglish, you'll get mentions of people named Zee and a fair amount of Mock French ("I am zee dev-ille"), but the letter-name is only used in contrast with zed. (Searching for Z in YouGlish gets you people saying zzzzzz, rather than saying the letter name, as far as I've seen.)
My daughter "Grover," has done a little poll of her 17–18-year-old friends, who all say they say Gen-Zee (she certainly does). She also notes that if she flaunts her half-Americanness and says a zee for the letter, her English friends give her a very hard time.
But check out Generation Z: most of the speakers on YouGlish say this with zed (even younger ones). It seems that the more "formal" and semantically transparent version of the word is treated more as if the Z is the letter of the alphabet. Gen Z seems to be treated as something more opaque—a name. (Grover claims Gen Zed is "hard to say." It does sound a bit more like it might be a past-tense verb.)
The term Generation Z seems to have originated in 1993, and is not marked as American in dictionaries. Gen Z followed in 1996, and is listed as "originally N. American" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Against the evidence we've seen here, the OED lists the zed pronunciation first for BrE:
But, in keeping with the YouGlish evidence, they do not include the zee pronunciation for the full form:
Gen Z, however you pronounce them, were born between 1997 and 2012 (or thereabouts)—so the oldest Gen Zers (or Zoomers, which happens to be the 2025 Russian WotY) were 25 in 2025, and the youngest ones entered their teens. So, they've become increasingly newsworthy and we're hearing Gen Z more. Here is how often Gen Z is used in the British part of the News on the Web corpus:
Those mentions will probably continue to go up as more of the group reaches adulthood. And some of them will be reaching voting age sooner than that.
(Happy Birthday, Grover!)
Related posts:
- Zee and Zed
- Sesame Street
- Anti-Americanismism, Part 2
- Zebra
- Introducing Grover: Can you believe that she is 18?! She's gone from minor to major.
Posts
Another data point: the new Pokemon game, Legends Z-A, is officially pronounced "zee ay" even in the Commonwealth. I was surprised to see an ad for it here in Australia where the narrator had a strong Australian accent and still said "zee".
ReplyDeleteI do a lot of work with a piece of software called (Open) ZFS. I have noticed that it is *Canadians* who are most insistent about saying "zed eff ess" (and "zed pool" for a related command), whereas speakers of other dialects seem more likely to accommodate. In a way this parallels dialect research (reported at ADS last year) showing that the Canadian (and British) fronted pronunciation(*) of "foreign A"(**) is more common among those Canadians who correctly identify that it is not the American pronunciation.
ReplyDelete(*) I.e., TRAP rather than PALM.
(**) As in Italian or Spanish words, e.g. the first syllable of "pasta"