Seeing zzzzz just looks like either a buzz, or zedzedzedzedzed to me. But in the American pronunciation of Z, 'zee', this reads like zeeeeeeee, which almost sounds like the exhalation of a snore, or inhalation through a blocked nostril.

My question stems from when I first wrote it as "zzzzz" (5 letters) in an English text, but a friend told me it should have been written as "zzzz" (4 letters) so I decided to ask here. More confusion arises from the following source because Susan Ince, the journalist, uses "zzz" (3 letters):

2011年5月26日 · Edit: Another Wikipedia page:. The big Z. It is a convention in American comics that the sound of a snore can be reduced to a single letter Z.

It is common to use zzzzz (or some other number of z letters) to indicate that the "speaker" is asleep. What is the origin of such a usage?

2020年1月21日 · The title says it all. Zzz is an onomatopoeic representation of snoring. It was commonly used in media where sound effects were not an option, notably in comic books.

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2014年3月18日 · The onomatapoeia theory is, as far as I'm aware, correct stemming from 1852. It's first published use was from Henry Thoreau who referenced the sound of sleeping locusts when he first wrote "…the dry-z-ing of the locusts is heard."

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2011年1月25日 · No. When someone who speaks English says it, they usually mean they're sleeping. The English usage has been around longer than the Korean, people use it without ever having seen the Korean version, and I'll wager that it was used in an online game before the Korean version too.