Pronounce the name of "z".

[mathman]

In the US, it is pronounced "zee".
In England it is pronounced "zed".

How did this difference come about? When?

[Captain Kremmen]

In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed (pronounced /zɛd/), reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (see below). In American English dialects, its name is zee /ziː/, deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form........
Other Indo-European languages pronounce the letter's name in a similar fashion, such as zet in Dutch, German, Romanian and Czech, zède in French, zäta in Swedish, zeta in Italian and Spanish, and zê in Portuguese.

From Wiki.

The above sounds plausible, but B comes from the Greek Beta,
so why is it not pronounced "bed"?

A similar thing to zed is done with the letter S
So another explanation is that it was done to prevent confusion between the letters C, S and Z.

If it was done to prevent confusion, then why name the letter S "ess" rather than "see".
The letter names Eff and Ess create a bigger problem as they sound almost identical.

[Fraggle Rocker]

The above sounds plausible, but B comes from the Greek Beta, so why is it not pronounced "bed"?You didn't read far enough into the Wikipedia article. Latin doesn't have the phoneme Z, so there was no need for the letter Z in the Roman alphabet. It was added in the first century BC, in order to transcribe the Greek words which at that time were being adopted prolifically by scholars.

The Roman alphabet was not actually derived directly from the Greek alphabet. It was from the Etruscan, which in turn had been modeled after the Greek. I'm not sure where the original Latin names for the letters came from, but it was not from the Greek names. Perhaps from the Etruscan names, or maybe just no-brainer onomatopoetic coinages like Cyrillic ah, be, ve, ge, de, ye...

Anyway, when they needed a letter to transcribe the Greek Z phoneme they borrowed zeta directly from Greek, the only letter that was acquired that way. So its name was also derived uniquely, by taking the Greek name right along with the letter.

The letter Z was also a latecomer to English spelling. In the early years S was used to transcribe both the S and Z sound. You just had to know how to read it; apparently English spelling was always a pain in the butt.:) Even today, very few native Anglo-Saxon words are spelled with Z. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is "adze," a type of axe, which I've only ever used in Scrabble. Like the Roman scribes, our scribes had to add the letter to their alphabet when they began writing all the foreign words that inundated our language after the Norman Invasion. So they just took the French name along with the letter the Normans were already using because they'd inherited it from the Romans.

At least two other languages have a different name for J. The Germans call it jot, pronounced "yoht," and in Spanish it's called jota, pronounced KHO-tah. Both of these are the Greek name iota, a name selected because in Latin I and J were originally two forms of the same letter, just like U and V. Iota comes from Hebrew yodh, the name of the letter in the Hebrew abjad from which iota and I were derived. (Abjad = a partially phonetic writing system with no vowels.)

Many of the names for the Greek letters were clearly taken from Hebrew right along with the letters. (Or from one of the Semitic languages using a similar alphabet.) Look at some of the more recognizable ones: aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, iodh, kaph, lamedh, tau.

[cosmictraveler]

How then do you say Freeze?