Ezh

Ezh (Ʒ ʒ; /ˈɛʒ/ ^ⓘ EZH), also called the "tailed z", is a letter, notable for its use in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the voiced palato-alveolar fricative consonant. This sound, sometimes transcribed ⟨zh⟩, occurs in the pronunciation as in vision (/vɪʒən/), precision (/prɪ.sɪʒən/), treasure (/tʃrɛʒər/), beige (/beɪʒ/), or pleasure (/plɛʒər/).

Ezh is also used as a letter in some orthographies of Laz and Skolt Sami, both by itself, and with a caron (⟨Ǯ⟩ ⟨ǯ⟩). In Laz, these represent voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ and its ejective counterpart /tsʼ/, respectively. In Skolt Sami they respectively denote partially voiced alveolar and post-alveolar affricates, broadly represented /dz/ and /dʒ/. It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, for example in the Aja language of Benin and the Dagbani language of Ghana, where the uppercase variant looks like a reflected sigma ⟨Σ⟩. It also appears in the orthography of Uropi.

The voiced palato-alveolar fricative, the sound /ʒ/ represents in the International Phonetic Alphabet, is more commonly represented by various other letters in different languages. These include the letter ⟨Ž⟩ as used in many Slavic languages, the letter ⟨Ż⟩ as used in Kashubian, the letter ⟨ج⟩ in a number of Arabic dialects, the Persian alphabet letter ⟨ژ⟩, the Cyrillic letter ⟨Ж⟩, the Devanagari letter (झ़), and the Esperanto letter ⟨Ĵ⟩.