'Zed' was the original form in English, coming from the Greek letter 'zeta.' Starting in the seventeenth century, 'zee' became an acceptable alternative in England by analogy with other letters (bee, cee, dee...), and both were brought over to the Americas. Noah Webster, when compiling his famous dictionary which was the source of many divergences in American/British English, states flatly in 1828 that the correct pronunciation is 'zee,' although the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a source from 1882 that claims the American South still uses 'zed.'

There's really not a whole lot more to it than basic linguistic changes.

Source: The Cambridge History of the English Language. ed. John Algeo. Cambridge UP, 2001. See the chapter on 'Americanisms,' pp. 184-218.

In a paper presented to the American Philosophical Society, Henry Phillips noted that Webster's choice of Zee in his dictionaries was "perhaps... some petty local peculiarity in the small country towns of New England (which) led him to believe that no other pronunciation could be a correct one." He also quoted another author, "This in New England is always zee; in the South, it is zed, while Pennsylvania seems to halt between the two opinions." In a survey of dictionaries, he notes several published in the U.S. which used zed. So, thinking of zee as American and zed as British creates confusion. The answer to your question seems to involve answering: Why did zee come to replace zed in the U.S.? Why was zee common in New England as opposed to zed, izzard, zod, etc.?

Phillips suggests why there might be a preference for zee over zed, izzard, zod, etc. He notes "zee is clearly a schoolmaster's desire to get rid of the strange sounding zed, and to make z follow the analogy of (some) other letter." Analogical change is very common in languages. So, given that we say bee, cee, and dee, zee could have been an error, a preference, or a preferred error because it sounds like what you call a letter. That's a good enough theory.

• A Note Respecting the Correct Name of the Last Letter of the English Alphabet Author(s): Henry Phillips, Jr. Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 21, No. 114 (Mar., 1883), pp. 330-333

This question perplexed me enough to do some digging on a rainy, grey day...

It appears that the letter "z" had numerous pronunciations in the British Isles and (what is now) the United States. Shakespeare pronounces it "zed" in King Lear. "Zed" is derived from the "zeta" in Greek. Another variation was "izzard" likely derived from "ézed" which was the French version of "zeta". Numerous other variants exist as well.

So what about "zee"? Was this a strictly American variant? Apparently not, as the first recorded pronunciation of Z as "zee" is found in Lye's New Spelling Book (1677). The author, Thomas Lye, lived his entire life in Great Britain.

The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language mentions "zee" as a pronunciation as so: “The modification of BrE zed (from Old french zede, through latin, from greek zeta) to zee in AmE appears to have been by analogy with bee, dee, vee, etc." Of course, this only addresses how "zee" came about and NOT why it became dominant in the United States.

So, it seems that zee vs. zed was not initially "one in America and the other in Britain". However, "zee" eventually became dominant in the U.S. Here's where there seems to be little agreement as to why.

One theory is that is was part of a general desire of Americans to separate themselves from the British in the years after the Revolutionary War (see "Zed" in The Queen's English: An A to Zed Guide To Distinctively British Words by Christoper J. Moore). Another is that the influence of immigrants from different parts of the world encouraged the drift. However, I cannot find anything suggesting any of these suggestions to be more than guesses and would put little faith in either of them.

What is known is that the matter of correct pronunciation was fairly-well laid to rest by decree in that most famous of American dictionaries: that of Noah Webster. In his 1828 edition, he enshrined "zee" as the correct American pronunciation in the following entry:

Z, the last letter of the English Alphabet, is a sibilant articulation, and is merely a vocal S. It bears the same relation to s, as v does to f. With us it has not a compound sound, nor is it a double consonant, as in the Italian and German. It is as simple in its sound as S.

As a numeral, z stands for 2000, and with a dash over it, z for 2, 000, 000. It is pronounced zee.

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I see answers claiming that 'zed' comes from 'zeta', but how does this reconcile with zeta being pronounced 'zeeta' in actual Greek?