Word.ws English Dictionary

-zza

-zza suffix: forms nicknames, especially of personal names.

Suffix

-zza

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, UK) Forms nicknames, especially of personal names.
    • Barry + -zza → Bazza
    • Sharon + -zza → Shazza

Origin of -zza

Originally Australian. From a mutation (specifically a zetacism) of the underlying rhotic consonant /ɹ/ to /z/ (see -z), combined with -a, a non-rhotic pronunciation spelling of -er (the Oxford colloquial clipping suffix). The template was popularized in print during the 1960s and 1970s by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries, whose satirical comic strip The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (first published in 1964 in the British magazine Private Eye) yielded the eponymous archetype Bazza, cementing the suffix in the Commonwealth lexicon.

Questions about -zza

What does -zza mean?
-zza means forms nicknames, especially of personal names.
What part of speech is -zza?
-zza is a suffix.

Words near -zza in the dictionary

  1. -zoite
  2. -zolac
  3. -zoon
  4. -zumab
  5. -zygous
  6. -zza
  7. -æ
  8. -æmia
  9. -æsthesia
  10. -æsthesis
  11. -èd

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -zza (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “-zza.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-zza. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.