It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, the sound of English g in mirage, s in vision, or Portuguese and French j.

[1] It evolved from the letter Ż, introduced by the author of the early 15th-century De orthographia Bohemica (probably Jan Hus) to indicate a Slavic fricative not represented in Latin alphabet.

[2] It was occasionally used for the closely related Slovak language during the period when it lacked a literary norm.

In Finnish, the letter ž is used in loan words, džonkki and maharadža, and in romanization of Cyrillic and other non-Latin alphabets.

In Finnish and Estonian, it is possible to replace ž with zh when it is technically impossible to typeset the accented character.