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Zhe (Cyrillic)

Zhe (Ж, ж) is the letter of Cyrillic alphabet which represents the voiced postalveolar fricative /Z/ (Con-34b.wav), 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.

ж-looking frog
Enlarge
ж-looking frog

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

Character encoding Case Decimal Hexadecimal Octal Binary
Unicode Capital 1046 0416 002026 0000010000010110
Small 1078 0436 002066 0000010000110110
ISO 8859-5 Capital 182 b6 266 0010110110
Small 214 d6 326 0011010110
KOI 8 Capital 246 f6 366 0011110110
Small 214 d6 326 0011010110
Windows 1251 Capital 198 c6 306 0011000110
Small 230 e6 346 0011100110

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

Last updated: 05-22-2005 00:01:46