Ж, the letter zhe

History

Ж is the Cyrillic letter Zhe, sometimes transliterated as Že. It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant /ʐ/ or the voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, the sound carried by the letter s in the English word measure. It is romanised as zh, as j, or as ž. It is also often set beside Д, the combination ДЖ serving to approximate the sound that English spells with the letter J.

Ж is not one of the letters that the documented ambiguities of Russian cursive gather around. Those ambiguities involve и, л, м, ш, щ and ы, which consist entirely or in part of one identical element, so that certain combinations of them cannot be deciphered without knowing the language or having broader context. Ж sits outside that group. It is worth remembering that most handwritten Russian, in personal letters and schoolwork alike, uses the cursive alphabet rather than the block letters of printed material, and that modern Cyrillic italic typefaces are based in their lowercase part mostly on the cursive shapes.

Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of the earlier Cyrillic tachygraphic writing known as skoropis, meaning rapid or running script, which was in turn the chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries, descended from the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books, the type reform that Peter I introduced in 1708.

The reform carried out after 1917 left the letter in place but altered words containing it. The genitive adjectival ending -аго was replaced with -его after ж, ц, ч, ш and щ, so that a document written before the change gives лучшаго where a later one gives лучшего.