{ "id": "epw13pqqzm", "slug": "c", "title": "C", "updated": "2026-10-25", "topic_path": [ { "id": "society", "label": "Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society" }, { "id": "society.language", "label": "Languages and linguistics", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society.language" }, { "id": "society.language.writing", "label": "Writing and notation systems", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society.language.writing" }, { "id": "society.language.writing.writing.latin", "label": "Latin script", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society.language.writing.writing.latin" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.weu.tbc.society.language", "label": "Western Europe · Before 500 BC: Languages and linguistics", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.tbc.society.language", "path": [ { "id": "geo.weu", "label": "Western Europe", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu" }, { "id": "geo.weu.tbc", "label": "Western Europe · Before 500 BC", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.tbc" }, { "id": "geo.weu.tbc.society", "label": "Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.tbc.society" }, { "id": "geo.weu.tbc.society.language", "label": "Languages and linguistics", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.tbc.society.language" } ] }, { "id": "geo.mena.tbc.society.language.writing", "label": "Middle East and North Africa · Before 500 BC: Writing and notation systems", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.mena.tbc.society.language.writing", "path": [ { "id": "geo.mena", "label": "Middle East and North Africa", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.mena" }, { "id": "geo.mena.tbc", "label": "Middle East and North Africa · Before 500 BC", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.mena.tbc" }, { "id": "geo.mena.tbc.society", "label": "Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.mena.tbc.society" }, { "id": "geo.mena.tbc.society.language", "label": "Languages and linguistics", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.mena.tbc.society.language" }, { "id": "geo.mena.tbc.society.language.writing", "label": "Writing and notation systems", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.mena.tbc.society.language.writing" } ] } ], "excerpt": "Letter C, third letter of the Latin alphabet, Unicode U+0043 (lowercase U+0063). Descends from Phoenician gimel via Greek gamma and Etruscan; in English it has hard /k/ and soft /s/ values, with diacritic variants Ć, Č, and others.", "snippet": "Letter C, third letter of the Latin alphabet, Unicode U+0043 (lowercase U+0063). Descends from Phoenician gimel via Greek gamma and Etruscan; in English it has hard /k/ and soft /s/ values, with diacritic variants Ć, Č, and others.", "node": "society.language.writing.writing.latin", "markdown": "# C\n\n**C** is the third letter of the [Latin alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/latin-alphabet), encoded in Unicode as U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C with the lowercase form U+0063 LATIN SMALL LETTER C. In English it represents two main consonant sounds, the \"hard\" /k/ of *cat* and the \"soft\" /s/ of *city*, and its written shape descends from the Phoenician letter gimel through Greek gamma and the Etruscan alphabet.[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) • [2](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/C)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Unicode code point | U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C, decimal 67, category Lu (Uppercase Letter), Basic Latin block, Basic Multilingual Plane[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) |\n| Encoding | One byte, hex 0x43 (decimal 67), in UTF-8, ASCII, Latin-1, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, GBK, and Big5 alike[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) |\n| Lowercase | U+0063 LATIN SMALL LETTER C; case folding maps the capital to it[3](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0043) |\n| Unicode version | Introduced in Unicode 1.1 (1993)[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) • [4](https://codepoints.net/U%2B0043?lang=en) |\n| Ancestry | Phoenician gimel (𐤂, value /g/) → Greek gamma (Γ) → Etruscan C → Latin C, third position throughout[5](https://visitbyblos.squarespace.com/en/phoenician-alphabet/gimel) • [6](https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?id=17&lang=en&page=Scrittura) |\n| English sounds | Hard /k/ before a, o, u, a consonant, or word-finally; soft /s/ before e, i, or y; further values /ʃ/, /tʃ/, and silent[7](https://www.learnenglishsounds.com/en/blog/all-sounds-letter-c-english-pronunciation-rules) |\n| Diacritic variants | Ć, Ĉ, Ċ, and Č are each decomposed as C plus a single combining mark[8](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/0100/) |\n\n## Encoding as a character\n\nU+0043 sits in the Basic Latin block, the range U+0000 through U+007F that Unicode inherited from ASCII, where every character is encoded as a single byte with the high bit set to zero.[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) Its UTF-8 byte sequence is therefore `43`, the same in [UTF-16](https://www.edgepedia.org/utf-16) big-endian order as the two-byte sequence `00 43`, and in UTF-32 as `00 00 00 43`.[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) Because legacy encodings such as Latin-1, KOI8-R, EUC-JP, and Big5 all descend from or align with ASCII on the basic letters, C has the byte 0x43 in each of them.[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c)\n\nIn markup and code the character is written `C` or `C` in HTML, `\\u0043` in [JavaScript](https://www.edgepedia.org/javascript) and JSON, and `\\43` in CSS; it has no HTML named entity.[1](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c) Its Unicode properties classify it as an uppercase letter with bidirectional class L (left-to-right), and it is flagged as an ASCII hex digit, valid as an identifier start character, and case-mappable to U+0063.[3](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0043) A typographic small-capital variant, ᴄ (U+1D04 LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL C), exists in the Phonetic Extensions block; it shares the capital's shape at lowercase size but is categorized as a lowercase letter and was added in Unicode 4.0.[9](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B1d04)\n\n## From gimel to C\n\nThe letter's ancestry runs through four scripts. Phoenician gimel, the third of the alphabet's twenty-two letters, represented the sound /g/.[5](https://visitbyblos.squarespace.com/en/phoenician-alphabet/gimel) The Greeks adopted it as gamma (Γ), keeping its third position and its /g/ value, and a western (Chalcidian) form of gamma passed into Italy through Etruscan intermediation.[5](https://visitbyblos.squarespace.com/en/phoenician-alphabet/gimel) • [6](https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?id=17&lang=en&page=Scrittura)\n\nThe sound change happened in Etruscan. That language lacked voiced plosives, so the Etruscans dropped beta and delta and used gamma, alongside kappa and qoppa, simply as one more sign for the voiceless velar /k/.[10](https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?id=10&lang=en&page=Scrittura) Latin took the letter with the Etruscan value: C has the sound /k/, the same as in Etruscan, even though its shape comes from the Chalcidian gamma, whose Greek value was /g/.[6](https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?id=17&lang=en&page=Scrittura)\n\n**One letter, two stops.** Early Latin therefore used C for both /k/ and /g/, an ambiguity inherited from Etruscan practice that lasted into the historical period: archaic inscriptions such as VIRCO (seventh to fifth century BC) spell a word now understood with /g/ using C, and the traditional abbreviations C. for Gaius and Cn. for Gnaeus preserved the old usage throughout Roman history.[11](https://litere.univ-ovidius.ro/Anale/documente-z/articole-2016-2/19%20Costa_2_2016_art.pdf) • [12](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/G) The distinction was repaired in the third century BC by adding a stroke to C, creating G for the voiced stop while C stood for the unvoiced velar only.[12](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/G) • [13](https://axivenpestcontrol.com/article/g-history-etymology-pronunciation-britannica) According to Plutarch (*Roman Questions*, 54, 59), the new letter was the invention of Spurius Carvilius Ruga, probably meaning he was the first to spell his cognomen RVGA instead of RVCA; G then took the seventh place in the Roman alphabet that Z, by then superfluous in Latin, had vacated.[12](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/G)\n\n## Hard and soft C in English\n\nEnglish inherited the letter with two values, described since the nineteenth century as hard and soft.[14](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/C) The rule is positional and highly regular: C is hard, /k/, before a, o, or u, before a consonant, and at the end of a word (*cat*, *cold*, *cup*, *clean*, *music*); it is soft, /s/, before e, i, or y (*cent*, *city*, *cycle*).[7](https://www.learnenglishsounds.com/en/blog/all-sounds-letter-c-english-pronunciation-rules) The vowel's length is irrelevant to the rule, so *cent* and *cedar* both have soft C.[15](https://readinguniverse.org/skill-explainer/phonics-patterns/soft-c-and-soft-g-skill-explainer/what-the-research-says-about-soft-c-and-soft-g) The same positional rule governs g, and together c and g are described as the only letters of English with both a hard and a soft sound.[15](https://readinguniverse.org/skill-explainer/phonics-patterns/soft-c-and-soft-g-skill-explainer/what-the-research-says-about-soft-c-and-soft-g)\n\nThe rule's practical consequence appears in spelling changes: when a suffix beginning with e, i, or y is added to a root ending in hard C, a k is inserted to keep the hard sound, giving *panic*, *panicked*.[7](https://www.learnenglishsounds.com/en/blog/all-sounds-letter-c-english-pronunciation-rules) • [15](https://readinguniverse.org/skill-explainer/phonics-patterns/soft-c-and-soft-g-skill-explainer/what-the-research-says-about-soft-c-and-soft-g) A few words also show other values, including /ʃ/ in *ocean*, /tʃ/ in *church*, and a silent C in *muscle*.[7](https://www.learnenglishsounds.com/en/blog/all-sounds-letter-c-english-pronunciation-rules)\n\nThe soft value is a Romance inheritance. In the [Romance languages](https://www.edgepedia.org/romance-languages), and in English under Norman French influence, c acquired the palatalized pronunciation /s/ before e and i, contrasting with the hard c of *crown*.[16](https://students.apexcollegeofnursingsciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The_Oxford_companion_to_the_English_language.pdf)\n\n## Derived letters and variants\n\nBecause Latin lacked a dedicated letter for the sound many languages needed from C, a family of diacritic variants grew up in the Latin Extended-A block. Each is defined in the standard as a decomposition of the base letter plus one combining mark: Ć (C with acute, U+0106), Ĉ (C with circumflex, U+0108), Ċ (C with dot above, U+010A), and Č (C with caron, U+010C).[8](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/0100/) Their assigned languages show how widely the variants spread: ć serves Polish, Croatian, and Serbian; ĉ is the [Esperanto](https://www.edgepedia.org/esperanto) letter; ċ appears in Maltese and old Irish Gaelic orthography; and č is used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and many other languages.[8](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/0100/) Fullwidth forms for CJK typesetting (U+FF23 for the capital) exist as well.[17](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/fullwidth-latin-small-letter-c)\n\n## References\n\n1. [LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C — Unicode Character Encoding Reference](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/latin-capital-letter-c)\n2. [1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/C — Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/C)\n3. [U+0043 \"C\" Latin Capital Letter C Unicode Character](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B0043)\n4. [U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C: C — Codepoints](https://codepoints.net/U%2B0043?lang=en)\n5. [Gimel 𐤂 — Third Letter of the Phoenician Alphabet, Visit Byblos](https://visitbyblos.squarespace.com/en/phoenician-alphabet/gimel)\n6. [Latin — Mnamon, Scuola Normale Superiore](https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?id=17&lang=en&page=Scrittura)\n7. [All the Sounds of the Letter C in English — Learn English Sounds](https://www.learnenglishsounds.com/en/blog/all-sounds-letter-c-english-pronunciation-rules)\n8. [Latin Extended-A — Unicode 18.0.0 NamesList](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/0100/)\n9. [U+1D04 \"ᴄ\" Latin Letter Small Capital C Unicode Character](https://www.unicodecharacter.org/u%2B1d04)\n10. [Etruscan — Mnamon, Scuola Normale Superiore](https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?id=10&lang=en&page=Scrittura)\n11. [(EX)PATRIATION — Analele Științifice ale Universității Ovidius Constanța](https://litere.univ-ovidius.ro/Anale/documente-z/articole-2016-2/19%20Costa_2_2016_art.pdf)\n12. [1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/G — Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/G)\n13. [G | History, Etymology, & Pronunciation | Britannica (2026)](https://axivenpestcontrol.com/article/g-history-etymology-pronunciation-britannica)\n14. [The New Student's Reference Work/C — Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/C)\n15. [What the Research Says About Soft 'c' and Soft 'g' — Reading Universe](https://readinguniverse.org/skill-explainer/phonics-patterns/soft-c-and-soft-g-skill-explainer/what-the-research-says-about-soft-c-and-soft-g)\n16. [The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992)](https://students.apexcollegeofnursingsciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The_Oxford_companion_to_the_English_language.pdf)\n17. [FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER C — Unicode Character Encoding Reference](https://unicodedecoder.com/characters/fullwidth-latin-small-letter-c)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script*\n\n*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/c", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/c.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"C\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/c. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[C](https://www.edgepedia.org/c)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/c](https://www.edgepedia.org/c). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"C\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/c. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "Letter C, third letter of the Latin alphabet, Unicode U+0043." }