thumb|Ze, from [[Alexandre Benois' 1904 alphabet book]]
Ze (З з; italics: З з or <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">З з</span>; italics: <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">З з</span>) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative , like the pronunciation of in "zulu".
Ze is romanized using the Latin letter .
The shape of Ze is very similar to the Arabic numeral three , and should not be confused with the Cyrillic letter E .
History and shape
thumb|Russian typewriters like this one were manufactured without the digit 3 as the letter Ze could be used instead.
Ze is derived from the Greek letter Zeta (Ζ ζ).
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was (zemlja), meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked similar to a Greek letter Ζ or Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom (). Though a majuscule form of this variant () is encoded in Unicode, historically it was only used as caseless or lowercase.
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Zemlja had a value of 7.
Medieval Cyrillic manuscripts and Church Slavonic printed books have two variant forms of the letter Zemlja: з and . Only the form was used in the oldest ustav (uncial) writing style; з appeared in the later poluustav (half-uncial) manuscripts and typescripts, where the two variants are found at proportions of about 1:1.