An American inhabitant of the Panama Canal Zone, a ten mile wide strip of land crossing the Isthmus of Panama on both sides of the Panama Canal, which was granted to the United States as a territory in 1904 and was transferred to Panama in 1979. Also attributive or as adj.
1910
Whatever your job, digging a canal, or driving a taxi-cab, or writing stock quotations, don't wear a uniform... The Zonian has a uniform, though, in spite of himself. It is the umbrella.
Everybody's Magazine March 322/1
1950
The man marrying a girl of mixed blood may be unaware of the general Zonian prejudice that classes all Panamanians as ‘colored’.
Social Forces December 161/1
1951
Zonians..need no longer do without—just because the commissaries are closed.
Panama Canal Review 3 August 9/3
1964
‘Zonians’, American inhabitants of the [Panama Canal] Zone.
Observer 12 January 1/5
1979
Within a very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady... The Zonians, 3,000 workers for the Panama Canal Company..saw the treaty as a sell-out.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Zonian typically occurs about 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
Zonian is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of Zonian, n., 1910–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1910
0.0003
1920
0.0072
1930
0.011
1940
0.012
1950
0.015
1960
0.016
1970
0.017
1980
0.018
1990
0.015
2000
0.012
2010
0.011
Zonian, n. was first published in 1986; not fully revised.