[1] Consequently, some Modern Scots words have a z in place of a yogh—the common surname Menzies was originally written Menȝies (pronounced mingis).

Yogh is shaped similarly to the Cyrillic letter З and the Arabic numeral 3, which are sometimes substituted for the character in online reference works.

[3] It stood for /ɡ/ and its various allophones—including [ɡ] and the voiced velar fricative [ɣ]—as well as the phoneme /j/ (⟨y⟩ in modern English orthography).

In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh was used to represent the voiced dental fricative [ð], as in its ⟨ȝoȝo⟩, now written ⟨dhodho⟩, pronounced [ðoðo].

The original Germanic g sound was expressed by the gyfu rune in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc (which is itself sometimes rendered as ȝ in modern transliteration).

In the Old English period, ᵹ was simply the way Latin g was written in the Insular script introduced at the Christianisation of England by the Hiberno-Scottish mission.

It only came to be used as a letter distinct from g in the Middle English period, where it evolved in appearance into ȝ, now considered a separate character.

By the Modern Scots period the yogh had been replaced by the character z, in particular for /ŋj/, /nj/ (nȝ) and /lj/ (lȝ), written nz and lz.

[6] The pronunciation of MacKenzie (and its variant spellings) (from Scottish Gaelic MacCoinnich [maxˈkʰɤɲɪç]), originally pronounced [məˈkɛŋjiː] in Scots,[1] shows where yogh became z. Menzies Campbell is another example.