Zhe (Cyrillic)

Zhe (Ж, ж) is the letter of Cyrillic alphabet which represents the voiced postalveolar fricative /Z/ (sound file), the same sound which is represented by "s" in the English word "treasure".

Zhe is the 7th letter of the Bulgarian and Belarussian alphabets, the 8th letter in the Macedonian, Russian and Serbian alphabets, and the 9th in the Ukrainian alphabet. It is also found in most non-Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic script, representing either /Z/ or /dZ/. In the old Cyrillic alphabet, zhe was the 7th letter. Its name was "живѣте" (zhivěte)—live, and it did not have a numerical value.

It is not known what zhe was derived from. No similar letter exists in Greek, Latin or any other alphabet of the time, though there is some graphic similarity with the Glagolitic letter "zhivete" () which represents the same sound. However, the origin of zhivete, like that of most Glagolitic letters, is unclear.

Zhe is most often transliterated as "zh", more rarely as "zx", except in Serbian and Macedonian where it is most often transliterated as "ž", or, lacking diacritics, simply as "z".

The Polish counterpart is "ż".

Zhe is one of the first letters learned by children who learn to write in Slavic languages, because it looks quite like a young frog floating in a pond, and in these languages the word meaning "frog" or "toad" is written "жаба".

Code positions

Its HTML entities are: Ж or Ж for capital and ж or ж for small letter.