Microsoft® Manual of Style, Fourth Edition

Z

z-

Hyphenate all words referring to entities that begin with z used as a separate letter, such as z-axis, z-coordinate, z-order, and z-test. Consult your project style sheet for capitalization.

z-axis

Use lowercase, hyphen, and regular type. In 3-D charts, the z-axis shows depth. It generally represents values. Refer to the z-axis as the value axis, where both the x-axis and y-axis are category axes, but include z-axis in parentheses if it will clarify the meaning.

zero, zeros

For consistency in Microsoft documentation, use zeros instead of zeroes as the plural of zero.

In measurements, when the unit of measurement is not abbreviated, zero takes the plural, as in “0 megabytes.”

zero character

In the ASCII character set, a zero character represents the ...