Zed. Not Zee.

Ask most English-speaking Canadian adults how the alphabet ends and they will say zed without hesitation. Ask many of their children and you will hear zee. That generational gap turns out to be a small but revealing window into how Canadian identity actually works.

Where the pronunciations came from

Zed is the older form. It traces through the French zède to the Greek zeta, and was standard in English throughout the Middle Ages. Zee emerged as a variant in the 1600s, likely because it rhymes with so many other letters while zed rhymes with none. For a time, both forms existed on both sides of the Atlantic.

After American independence, zee became part of a broader effort to distinguish American English from British. Noah Webster formalized it in his 1828 dictionary, and the Alphabet Song — copyrighted in Boston in 1835 — sealed it by ending its rhyme on "me." Once millions of children learned the alphabet that way, zee was not going anywhere in the United States.

What Canadian children hear

Canadian children, especially those with significant exposure to American television and media, grow up hearing zee. Studies of English-speaking schoolchildren — particularly in southern Ontario — have found consistently high rates of zee among younger speakers.

But Canadian children also encounter a competing influence. Since the 1970s, French instruction has been part of anglophone education across most of Canada, and in French the letter is zède: effectively the same sound as zed. The Alphabet Song pulls one way; French class pulls another; and most English-speaking adults around them still say zed.

Where the research gets interesting

Linguist J.K. Chambers, who studied this zed/zee pattern in southern Ontario over several decades, found that zee among young Canadians does not behave like a permanent language shift. Instead, it follows what linguists call an age-graded change: children tend to use zee more, but many shift toward zed as they get older. The numbers bear that out. The 1974 Scargill survey found between 72 and 79 per cent of Canadians saying zed. Charles Boberg's North American Regional Vocabulary Survey, conducted between 1999 and 2007 after decades of American media saturation, still found roughly 70 per cent saying zed and 28 per cent saying zee.

Chambers also notes that American immigrants to Canada frequently report switching from zee to zed after arriving, because zee reliably attracts comment. The social cue is understood without anyone needing to explain it.

The regional exceptions

The pattern is not uniform. Newfoundland has long shown higher rates of zee than the national average, and Atlantic Canada generally trends more toward zee than central Canada. McGill University's ongoing New Survey of Canadian English found that among younger Newfoundland respondents, zee has become the majority form — a reflection of Newfoundland's distinct linguistic history, shaped heavily by eighteenth-century migration from southeastern Ireland and southwestern England.

What it amounts to

Canadian English is not simply British English with American influence layered on top. It is its own variety, shaped by a distinct historical experience.

The zed/zee divide illustrates something broader about Canadian identity. It is maintained not through grand declarations but through countless small, mostly unconscious adjustments. A child hears zee from television and zed from the adults around them, and somewhere along the way — usually after childhood — zed wins.

Not because anyone insists on it. Simply because, to most Canadians, it sounds Canadian.

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Coloured etching of a zebra, by British artist J. Webb (1825 - 1895) after W. Panarmo (1796 - 1867). (1)

Further Reading

• J.K. Chambers, "Zee and Zed in Southern Ontario." University of Toronto

• "Zed," Historica Canada / The Canadian Encyclopedia

• McGill University, New Survey of Canadian English (interim results, updated April 2024)

• McGill News, "Taking Stock of the State of English in Canada"

• Editing Canadian English, Editors' Association of Canada (referenced by the Language Portal of Canada)

(1) Image from the "Look and Learn" Archive, Zoological Society of London established in 1826. From the Wellcome Collection. Public domain, Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0.