September 28th, 2022 → 9:50 am @ Lea // No Comments

“Thou whoreson zed,
thou unnecessary letter!” — King Lear

Apparently the 26 character alphabet wasn’t always so. Over time certain letters have been added, others dropped. What I find particularly interesting is that we still see vestiges of these changes in contemporary language usage. The letter Z (or zed in British English), for example, wasn’t always a part of the Latin alphabet, which is why we see so few words that use it today! Shakespeare found z’s relative scarcity to be an insult – yet another rather unique Shakespearean putdown!