Zed is for Zebra

At Build-a-Bear this morning,  I learned that the animal that I have always called a "zee-bruh" is known as a "zeh-bruh" here in England when my boss Dave asked me to stuff one for a little girl. Later, I remarked to a colleague that this pronunciation was odd to me. "In the U.S.," I explained, "the zebra is always used as the classic example of a word starting with the letter Z when kids learn the alphabet, because zee is the first syllable of zebra." My colleague smiled and nodded, politely. When I got home and shared the story with Will, however, he burst into laughter. "She probably had no idea what you were on about," he remarked, gleefully reminded my that in British English, the last letter of the alphabet is called "zed" rather than "zee!"