Cyrillic letter Zhe
Missing image Cyrillic_letter_Zhe.png Image:Cyrillic letter Zhe.png
Cyrillic alphabet
А	Б	В	Г	Ґ	Д	Ђ
Ѓ	Е	Ё	Є	Ж	Ѕ	З
И	І	Ї	Й	Ј	К	Л
Љ	М	Н	Њ	О	П	Р
С	Т	Ћ	Ќ	У	Ў	Ф
Х	Ц	Ч	Џ	Ш	Щ	Ъ
Ы	Ь	Э	Ю	Я
Archæic letters
Ҁ	Ѹ	Ѡ	Ѿ	Ѻ	Ѣ	ІА
Ѥ	Ѧ	Ѫ	Ѩ	Ѭ	Ѯ	Ѱ
Ѳ	Ѵ	Ѷ

Zhe (Ж, ж) is the letter of Cyrillic alphabet which represents the voiced postalveolar fricative /Z/ (sound file), the same sound which is represented by "s" in the English word "treasure".

Zhe is the 7th letter of the Russian, Bulgarian, and Belarussian alphabets, the 8th letter in the Macedonian and Serbian alphabets, and the 9th in the Ukrainian alphabet. It is also found in most non-Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic script, representing either /Z/ or /dZ/. In the old Cyrillic alphabet, zhe was the 7th letter. Its name was "живѣте" (zhivěte)—live, and it did not have a numerical value.

It is not known what zhe was derived from. No similar letter exists in Greek, Latin or any other alphabet of the time, though there is some graphic similarity with the Glagolitic letter "zhivete" () which represents the same sound. However, the origin of zhivete, like that of most Glagolitic letters, is unclear.

Zhe is most often transliterated as "zh", more rarely as "zx", except in Serbian and Macedonian where it is most often transliterated as "ž", or, lacking diacritics, simply as "z".

The Polish counterpart is "ż".

Zhe is one of the first letters learned by children who learn to write in Slavic languages other than Russian, because it looks quite like a young frog floating in a pond, and in these languages the word meaning "frog" is written "жаба".

Code positions

Character encoding	Case	Decimal	Hexadecimal	Octal	Binary
Unicode	Capital	1046	0416	002026	0000010000010110
	Small	1078	0436	002066	0000010000110110
ISO 8859-5	Capital	182	b6	266	0010110110
	Small	214	d6	326	0011010110
KOI 8	Capital	246	f6	366	0011110110
	Small	214	d6	326	0011010110
Windows 1251	Capital	198	c6	306	0011000110
	Small	230	e6	346	0011100110

Its HTML entities are: Ж or Ж for capital and ж or ж for small letter.

ja:Ж