In Skolt Sami they respectively denote partially voiced alveolar and post-alveolar affricates, broadly represented /dz/ and /dʒ/.

As a phonetic symbol, it originates with Isaac Pitman's English Phonotypic Alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook.

Humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino proposed in 1524 a reform of Italian orthography introducing ezh as an uppercase ⟨ç⟩ for the [dz] sound.

[1] In contexts where "tailed z" is used in contrast to tail-less z, notably in standard transcription of Middle High German, Unicode ⟨ʒ⟩ is sometimes used, strictly speaking incorrectly.

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.

[citation needed] In handwritten Cyrillic, the numeral ⟨3⟩ is sometimes written in a form similar to the ezh, so as to distinguish it from the letter ze ⟨З⟩.

[citation needed] Ezh looks similar to the syllabogram ⟨ろ⟩, which is the hiragana form of the Japanese mora ro.

[5] U+1D23 ᴣ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL EZH is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.

[6] U+1DF18 𝼘 LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH PALATAL HOOK was previously used in the IPA[7][8] For Mac: Option⌥+:, followed by ⇧ Shift+Z or Z respectively.