The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta (Ζ), Etruscan z , Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze З, as well as Ж.
The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called ziqq, may not have been based on a hieroglyph, and may have depicted a "fetter".
It has two forms, depending on its position in the word: The similarity to rāʼ ر is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to jīm and ḥāʼ.
The letter is used in a number of languages, such as Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur (see K̡ona Yezik̡).
Zayin, in addition to ʻayin, gimel, teth, nun, shin, and tzadi, is one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll).