Ƶ

Ƶ (minuscule: ƶ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from Z with the addition of a stroke. It was used in the Jaŋalif alphabet (as a part of Uniform Turkic Alphabet) for the Tatar language in the first half of the 20th century to represent a voiced postalveolar fricative (IPA: ʒ). It is also used in the Latin Chechen spelling. Italians often use it for the [dz] sound in the hand-writing, while the normal Z is used for the [ts] sound. In Polish, the character Ƶ is used as an allographic variant of the letter Ż. Germans and Spaniards often use this sign in the hand-writing as the letter Z. Ƶ was sometimes used instead of Z to represent the zaire, a former currency of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ƶ is also used by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers as a variant of Z in hand-written equations, so as not to confuse the symbol with the numeral 2. The Unicode of uppercase Ƶ is 01B5, while the lowercase ƶ is 01B6.