Ezh

In Unicode 1.0, the character was unified with the unrelated character yogh (Ȝ ȝ), which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Historically, ezh is derived from Latin z, but yogh is derived from Latin g by way of insular G (and incidentally giving rise to the English mispronunciation of the Scottish surname [and business] Menzies as [ˈmenziz] instead of [ˈmɪŋɪs]). The characters look very similar and do not appear alongside each other in any alphabet. To differentiate between the two more clearly, the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society extend the uppermost tip of the 'yogh' into a little curvature upward.

The ezh looks similar to the common form of the figure three (3). To differentiate between the two characters, Ezh includes the sharp zigzag of the letter z, while the number is usually curved. This still remains a problem though, as some type fonts (found on clock faces among other things) use a figure for "3" identical in shape to an ezh. In the Cyrillic script handwritings, the digit 3 is written as an Ezh to distinguish it from the letter Ze.

Stroke order in writing ろ (Japanese hiragana)

Ezh looks similar to ろ, the Japanese hiragana letter for the mora "ro". However, the central corner of ろ points out further away to the left than that of ezh.

The forms 'Ze', 'Three', 'Ezh' and 'Zhe'

The Cyrillic letter Ze, written as З (capitalized) or з (Lower Case), has a similar body to Ezh. As customary, the Cyrillic script has a stiffer structure, but both letters have common roots in historical cursive forms of ‘Z’, taken from the Greek letter Zeta.

The pronunciations of Latin Ezh and Cyrillic Ze, however, are different phonemes: while /Ӡ/ stands for the s in the word vision, Russian Ze (З) stands for z as in zebra. For the /Ӡ/ phoneme, Cyrillic uses 'Zhe (Ж)'.

Older Russian typewriters, often to save space, sometimes used З (Ze) to write the numeral form of 3.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) it represents the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example: vision /ˈvɪʒən/. It is pronounced as the "s" in "treasure" or the "si" in the word "precision".

It is used with that value in Uropi.

It is used in the "International Standard" orthography, as devised by Marcel Courthiade for Romani.

It was also used in an obsolete Latin alphabet for writing Komi, where it represented [d͡ʑ] (similar to English j). In the modern Cyrillic alphabet, this sound is written as дз.

Also during Latinisation in the USSR was used in the project of Unified Northern Alphabet and other alphabets of the people of the Soviet Union in the 20-30s years.

In Unicode, a standard designed to allow symbols from all writing systems to be represented and manipulated by computers, the ezh (alternatively ℨ) is used as the symbol to represent the abbreviation for dram, an apothecaries' system unit of mass.