A little girl who had learned her alphabet began by Awakening and followed the alphabet all through the day, each letter representing many things, until she went to sleep, Zzzzzz. My name is a game of letters and their sounds by Lois Baker Muehl in This may sound crazy, but even in the breeze the zigzag cages will seem cozy. They will all be the right kind and size. And at night I will play a zither to help all the animals go to sleep and snooze, Zzzzz. Edit: Another Wikipedia page :. It is a convention in American comics that the sound of a snore can be reduced to a single letter Z.
Thus a speech bubble with this letter standing all alone again, drawn by hand rather than a font type means the character is sleeping in most humorous comics. This can be seen, for instance, in Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strips. Being such a long-established device, the Z-bubble does not even imply that the character is snoring anymore, but just sleeping. Jim Davis has based some jokes starring Garfield upon this technique; for example, in one strip, Garfield is unable to sleep because his Z-bubble is pointing in the wrong direction.
When he grabs the bubble's tail to make it point at himself, he falls asleep. Originally, the resemblance between the 'z' sound and that of a snore seemed exclusive to the English language, but the spread of American comics has made it a frequent feature in other countries.
An exception to this is in Japanese manga, where the usual symbol for sleep is a large bubble coming out of the character's nose. I have just discovered this question and am surprised that more reference has not been made to the word snooze. There is a passing reference in the accepted answer but, on checking, this word dates back to and is described as 'a cant word, echoic of a snore.
My theory, anyway! Someone came close to the correct answer, but failed to put 2 and 2 together. The letter Z represents the motion of someone sawing wood with a hand saw, which sounds close to the sound of someone snoring.
Originally someone "sawing wood" was the description given to the sound when snoring, often accompanied by an image of sawing wood or a hand motion in the Z formation of someone sawing wood. Zzz or zzzz is used in writing to represent the act of sleeping. It is used because human snoring often sounds like the pronunciation of the letter. Z looks like also sounds like electrical wave, and people send out brain waves when they are sleeping.
See: here and here. Sign up to join this community. Unlike any other medium, having a written way to convey sound is useful in comics. And differentiating between a person who is sleeping and someone lying down with their eyes closed turned out to be useful.
What we do know is that by it had earned an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary , indicating widespread acceptance. The Washington City Paper also reported alternatives in other languages, like chrrr in German and rooooon in Spanish, but none matches the ubiquity of the Z.
As mentioned earlier, onomatopoeia is kind of a random process. As far as getting a point across to readers, sleeping people really do go zzz.
Try Babbel. Toggle Menu. Ready to learn? Pick a language to get started! The Birth Of Zzz The great thing about written language is that it provides a history of terms. The reason behind zzz and how it came into being is because comic strip artists had a difficult time representing sleeping. Since there's no real way of representing sleeping, they came up with a sound-word onomatopoeia instead. Boom, buzz, crash, bang, pow, zip, and clang are all onomatopoeias, but depending on their use, are also very real words.
They can be words, such as verbs, or they can represent a certain sound that's made, such as a bee's buzzing. In this case, you'd use "buzz" as a noun. So, when you say the bee went "buzz", it's an onomatopoeia. You can trace the letter Z back to Henry David Thoreau's writings: Journal , whose writings referenced the low buzz of insects, or better yet, "The dry z-ing of locusts.
As it's hard to represent sounds made while you sleep with letters, the artists went with zzz since it represented the sounds best. Generally, capital ZZZs mean snoring loud, or something to that effect, often with old, large men.
And, it's now turned into its own meaning, no longer requires an explanation, and is basically accepted all over the world as a representation of sleeping. What Does Zzz Mean? Marko Ticak. Zzz is commonly used in comic books to indicate that someone is sleeping. It has also become a part of the idiom catch some Zs , which means to sleep.
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