Short form of Zedekiah, from Hebrew Tsidqiyahu meaning 'justice of God.'
Zed has one of the more philosophically interesting origins in the naming lexicon: it is simply the British, Australian, Canadian, and most of the world's English-speaking pronunciation of the final letter of the alphabet, Z, which itself descends from the Phoenician letter zayin through Greek zeta. The letter's name traveled from ancient Semitic scribes to the Roman alphabet, and the pronunciation "zed" (versus the American "zee") has been a reliable marker of English dialect ever since. As a given name, Zed thus carries within it not a word but a symbol — the end, the finishing point, the last note of the alphabet's song.
As a standalone name Zed has most often appeared as a strong, monosyllabic masculine choice with an almost mythic terseness. In popular culture it achieved a kind of cool infamy through the character Zed in Pulp Fiction and a separate, more heroic incarnation in the Men in Black franchise. It functions as a short form of Zedekiah, a Hebrew name meaning "Yahweh is righteous," which was borne by the last king of Judah before the Babylonian captivity — giving Zed, if one looks beneath the surface, an ancient and weighty genealogy.
In modern naming culture, Zed benefits from several converging forces: the vogue for short, punchy names; the appeal of names that feel international and untethered to any single tradition; and the quiet rebellion of choosing a name that doubles as the alphabet's full stop. It is a name that knows exactly where it stands — at the very end of something, which is sometimes exactly where the most interesting things begin.