system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is "Z" called "Zee" in America and "Zed" in the rest of the English speaking countries?

It is the same letter and used the same everywhere, but we call it by a different name. Why did this happen to only one letter?
gpt
Different manners of speaking are natural in a language, England is home to a great many dialects, which were exported to the Americas. It happened to be that some forms of speaking prevailed in each place as English came to be more standardized, and these often differ between North America (and between regions in North America) and England. For example, although "diaper" is universally used in America over the English "nappy," the word "diaper" was first used as such in England. The non-American colonies, having close ties to the United Kingdom for much longer than the U.S., tended to emulate the U.K. speaking habits, which is why their national varieties don't differ quite so much as American and British English do.

In this particular case, we know that "zee" is first known from the 1670s, but it may have been in use earlier. It likely comes from the way the letter is pronounced in many words, whereas "zed" comes from the French name "zede."

It's worth noting there is no objectively correct way to pronounce words, and there is particularly no standardization for letters.