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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

More people in the world say “zee” than “zed”. I’m surprised to hear a British person wants to sound like they’re French. (I’m just kidding as I hope you are about beating children)

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Are you sure? I think they say zed in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. That’s quite a few English speakers.

Canada, NZ, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria...

From [1]:

> Population > 2018 estimate > 1,352,642,280

> Official languages > Hindi > English

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India

You do realize that a minority of people in India speak English, right?

As a starting point, this source lists about 128 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

You've given a figure that is around a third of the entire population of the United States, so I think I'm on safe ground, even taking into account the Indian government's well known inability at accurate record taking, but thanks for the list, Pakistan has "187,758,480" under English speakers. No chance of them saying "zee".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983828

Whatever the internet tells you about what is "standard"... as someone who has spent his life in New Zealand, I can assure you the majority of under-30s usually use "zee". "Zed" is on its way out.

It probably started with the popularity things like Sesame Street and Dragon Ball Z (Dragon Ball Zee).

However, interestingly, the one time everyone uses "zed" is when we acronymise the country name -- NZ, or N-Zed.

Thanks to India, more people in the world say "w" like "v" but I feel safe knowing that Indians have a better accent and better spelling than anyone in North America, and I would never joke about anything this serious.

;-)

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