Last letter of the alphabet

In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to Z being followed by & when her character Jacob Storey says, "He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."

Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on the end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö, while it is Å for Danish and Norwegian. In the German alphabet, the umlauts ("Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü") and the letter "ß" are regarded as modifications of the vowels a/o/u respectively and of the letter "s," not as independent letters, so they come after the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with z.

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