1710: czar and tsar Aug 20, 2019
The titles of 'kaiser', 'caesar', and 'czar' all mean 'emperor' [1] in different languages, but 'czar' can also be spelt 'csar', 'tzar' or 'tsar'. The word in Russian is царь with ц representing the 'ts' (ь is the symbol for softening consonants). It is not uncommon for a single letter to represent this double-articulation; German orthography does this with Z and the Hebrew alphabet has צ as an equivalent, but the difference here in spelling from using the increasingly standard Ts/Tz for English words broadly, and was adopted later. Cs/Cz is older was introduced into English by a Slovenian, Sigismund von Herberstein, who used the convention used by many Slavic or other Eastern Europeans for writing that sound generally.
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