General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

C

C is the third letter of the 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^•²

Key fact	Detail
Unicode code point	U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C, decimal 67, category Lu (Uppercase Letter), Basic Latin block, Basic Multilingual Plane¹
Encoding	One byte, hex 0x43 (decimal 67), in UTF-8, ASCII, Latin-1, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, GBK, and Big5 alike¹
Lowercase	U+0063 LATIN SMALL LETTER C; case folding maps the capital to it³
Unicode version	Introduced in Unicode 1.1 (1993)¹^•⁴
Ancestry	Phoenician gimel (𐤂, value /g/) → Greek gamma (Γ) → Etruscan C → Latin C, third position throughout⁵^•⁶
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 silent⁷
Diacritic variants	Ć, Ĉ, Ċ, and Č are each decomposed as C plus a single combining mark⁸

Encoding as a character

U+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 Its UTF-8 byte sequence is therefore 43, the same in UTF-16 big-endian order as the two-byte sequence 00 43, and in UTF-32 as 00 00 00 43.¹ 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

In markup and code the character is written C or C in HTML, \u0043 in JavaScript and JSON, and \43 in CSS; it has no HTML named entity.¹ 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 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

From gimel to C

The letter's ancestry runs through four scripts. Phoenician gimel, the third of the alphabet's twenty-two letters, represented the sound /g/.⁵ 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^•⁶

The 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 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

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^•¹² 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^•¹³ 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

Hard and soft C in English

English inherited the letter with two values, described since the nineteenth century as hard and soft.¹⁴ 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 The vowel's length is irrelevant to the rule, so cent and cedar both have soft C.¹⁵ 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

The 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^•¹⁵ A few words also show other values, including /ʃ/ in ocean, /tʃ/ in church, and a silent C in muscle.⁷

The soft value is a Romance inheritance. In the 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

Derived letters and variants

Because 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 Their assigned languages show how widely the variants spread: ć serves Polish, Croatian, and Serbian; ĉ is the Esperanto letter; ċ appears in Maltese and old Irish Gaelic orthography; and č is used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and many other languages.⁸ Fullwidth forms for CJK typesetting (U+FF23 for the capital) exist as well.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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C

Encoding as a character

From gimel to C

Hard and soft C in English

Derived letters and variants

References

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