Last edited Wed Jun 13, 2012, 01:55 PM - Edit history (1)

In Russian it's:

Царь

The Library of Congress transliteration system uses 'Ts' for 'Ц'. For the soft sign 'ь' an apostrophe is sometimes used, but sometimes it's left off too.

So you could do Tsar or Tsar'. The former tends to be more common though.

*On Edit*

Originally I wrote that 'Czar' came from the Polish spelling, but it looks like I was wrong about that.

it would be pronounced "char"

I'd been told long ago that it came from the Polish spelling. It looks like that may be incorrect.

Apparently 'Czar' entered Western languages through the 16th century travel accounts of Baron Sigsimund von Herberstein. That rang a bell for me, since I actually had to read this work back in college.

Von Herberstein came from a German-speaking family in what is now Slovenia, though at the time it was Habsburg possession. His travels to Russia and writings about them are very important, because very little was known about Russia back then. Though he was German, he also knew the local Slovenian dialect and wrote about his travels in Latin.

For whatever reason, he chose to use the 'Czar' spelling in the first Latin edition of his works. There are some really interesting theories about why in the comment section of this blog I've linked to below. The best guess seems to be that 'cz' was sometimes used for the 'ts' sound in some German and south Slavic dialects at the time (as well as Hungarian too). So it's reasonable to assume that von Herberstein, as a German and Slovenian speaker, would use 'cz' for the 'ts' sound.

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003357.php