The letter C is the third letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is see (IPA: /siː/).

History

When the Roman alphabet was introduced into Britain, C represented only /k/ and this value of the letter has been retained in loanwords to all the insular Celtic languages: in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, C, c, is still only /k/. The Old English or "Anglo-Saxon" writing was learned from the Celts, apparently of Ireland; hence C, c, in Old English, also originally represented /k/: the words kin, break, broken, thick, seek, were in Old English written cyn, brecan, brocen, Þicc, séoc. But during the course of the Old English period, /k/ before front vowels (/e/ and /i/) was palatalized, having, by the 10th century, advanced nearly or quite to the sound of /tʃ/, though still written c, as in cir(i)ce, wrecc(e)a. On the continent, meanwhile, a similar phonetic change had also been going on.

Original Latin /k/ before front vowels had palatalized in Italy to the sound of /tʃ/, and in France to that of /ts/. Yet for these new sounds the old character C, c, was still retained before e and i, the letter thus represented two distinct values. Moreover the Latin phoneme /kʷ/ (represented by QV, or qu) de-labialized to /k/ meaning that the various Romance languages had /k/ before front vowels. In addition, Northern French used the Greek letter K, so that the sound /k/ could be represented by either k or c, the latter of which could represent either /k/ or /ts/. These French inconsistencies as to C and K were, after the Norman Conquest, applied to the writing of English, which caused a considerable re-spelling of the Old English words. Thus while Old English candel, clif, corn, crop, cú, remained unchanged, Cent, cæ´ (cé´), cyng, brece, séoce, were now (without any change of sound) spelt Kent, keȝ, kyng, breke, seoke; even cniht was subsequently spelt kniht, knight, and Þic, Þicc, became thik, thikk, thick. The Old English cw- was also at length (very unnecessarily) displaced by the French qw, qu, so that the Old English cwén, cwic, became Middle English qwen, quen, qwik, quik, now queen, quick. The sound /tʃ/ to which Old English palatalized c had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly (in Central French) from Latin c before a. In French it was represented by ch, as in champ, cher:–Latin camp-um, caōr-um; and this spelling was now introduced into English: the Hatton Gospels, written about 1160, have in Matt. i-iii, child, chyld, riche, mychel, for the cild, rice, mycel, of the Old English version whence they were copied. In these cases, the Old English c gave place to k, qu, ch; but, on the other hand, c in its new value of /ts/ came in largely in French words like processiun, emperice, grace, and was also substituted for ts in a few Old English words, as miltse, bletsien, in early Middle English milce, blecien. By the end of the 13th century both in France and England, this sound /ts/ de-affricated to /s/; and from that date c before front vowels has been, phonetically, a duplicate or subsidiary letter to s; used either for etymological reasons, as in lance, cent, or (in defiance of etymology) to avoid the ambiguity due to the "etymological" use of s for /z/, as in ace, mice, once, pence, defence.

Thus, to show the etymology, English spelling has advise, devise, instead of advize, devize, which while advice, device, dice, ice, mice, twice, etc., do not reflect etymology; example has extended this to hence, pence, defence, etc., where there is no etymological necessity for c. Former generations also wrote sence for sense.

Hence, today the Romance languages and English have a common feature inherited from Vulgar Latin where C takes on either a "hard" or "soft" value depending on the following vowel. In English and French, C takes the "hard" value /k/ finally and before A, O, and U, and the "soft" value /s/ before Æ, E, I, Œ or Y. However, as with everything else regarding English spelling, there are a couple of exceptions: "soccer" and "Celt" are words that have a k sound in the "wrong" place.

Romance languages obey similar rules, but the soft value is different in several languages, such as a voiceless dental fricative /θ/ in Castilian Spanish and /ʧ/ in Italian and Romanian.

Other languages use C with different values, such as /k/ regardless of position in Irish and Welsh; /θ/ in Fijian; /ʤ/ in Turkish, Tatar, and Azeri; /ʧ/ in Indonesian, Malay, and a number of African languages such as Hausa, Fula, and Manding; /ʦ/ in Albanian, Bosnian, Czech, Croatian, Esperanto, Hungarian, Ido, Interlingua, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovenian, Slovak; and /tsʰ/ in Romanized Chinese. It is also used as a transliteration of the Cyrillic "Ц" in the Latinic forms of Serbian and Macedonian.

There are several common digraphs with C, the most common being CH, which in some languages such as German is far more common than C alone. In English, CH most commonly takes the value /ʧ/, but can take the value /k/ or /ʃ/; some dialects of English also have /x/ in words like loch where other speakers pronounce the final sound as /k/. CH takes various values in other languages, such as /ç/, /k/, or /x/ in German, /ʃ/ in French, /k/ in Interlingua and Italian, /ʈʂʰ/ in Mandarin Chinese, and so forth. CK, with the value /k/, is often used after short vowels in Germanic languages such as English, German and Swedish (but some other Germanic languages use KK instead, such as Dutch and Norwegian). The digraph CZ is found in Polish and CS in Hungarian, both representing /ʧ/. In Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian, sc represents /ʃ/ (however in Italian and related languages this only happens before e or i, otherwise it represents /sk/).

As a phonetic symbol, lowercase c is the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal plosive, and capital C is the X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal fricative.

Various Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital C is codepoint U+0043 and the lowercase c is U+0063.

The ASCII code for capital C is 67 and for lowercase c is 99; or in binary 01000011 and 01100011, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital C is 195 for lowercase c is 131.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "C" and "c" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings of C

• A c with a bar over it is an abbreviation for the Latin word "cum", meaning "with".
• In anatomy, C means cervical (cervix meaning "neck"), as in C-spine, or written with a number refers to a numbered cervical vertebra (C1 to C7) or cervical spinal nerve (C1 - C8)
• In astronomy,
  • C stands for a class of stars known as carbon stars.
  • C stands for comet (long period), as in C/1957 P1 (Comet Mrkos).
  • C stands for a February 1 through 15 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (e.g. C/1962 C1, Comet Seki-Lines) or asteroid (e.g. (3950) 1986 CH).
• In baseball, C is the abbreviation for the position of catcher.
• In basketball, C is the abbreviation for the position of center.
• In biochemistry, C is the symbol for the amino acid cysteine and the nitrogenous nucleic acid base cytosine.
• Brassiere cup size C
• In business, C is a "creation" initial. It is used for the company name etc. in many Japanese companies.
• In Canadian television, the C rating indicates a program intended to be viewed by children.
• In chemistry, C is the symbol for carbon.
• In the CMYK color model, C stands for the color cyan.
• In communication, c is an abbreviation for the word "see" in SMS or instant message.
• In computing,
  • C denotes the C programming language. Several of its derivatives have names including the letter C, for example C++, and Objective-C.
  • C is a security division ("Discretionary Protection") in the TCSEC.
• In currency, c or ¢ (c with a vertical or slanted bar through it) means cent.
• In economics, C is usually used to represent consumption.
• In education, C is an average grade.
• In electrical engineering,
  • C is the control grid bias power supply (originally a battery) of vacuum tube circuitry.
  • C is the variable for capacitance, and is used to label capacitors on schematics.
  • C is a standard size of dry-cell battery.
• In espionage, C is the head of MI6.
• In finance, C is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for Citigroup.
• In gold, C is the abbreviation for Carat.
• In hardware, a C-clamp is a type of fastener, so called because its shape resembles the capital C.
• In history, c is an abbreviation for circa. When used with years, it means about (e.g., "c. 1500" means around the year 1500).
• In international relations, C sometimes represents the Commonwealth of Nations.
• In international licence plate codes, C stands for Cuba.
• In international paper sizes, C is a series of sizes with an aspect ratio of roughly 70% width to height. This series is primarily used for envelopes.
• In mathematics,
  • C represents the circumference of a circle.
  • C is often used as a digit meaning twelve in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 13 or greater.
  • C is often used as the constant of integration
  • Blackboard bold (double-struck capital C) (Unicode U+2102 "ℂ") denotes the set of all complex numbers.
  • C with indices denotes the number of combinations, a binomial coefficient.
  • Blackletter (Unicode U+212D "ℭ") denotes the first beth number: the cardinality of the set of real numbers (the "continuum"), or of the power set of natural numbers.
  • Cⁿ and C^∞ are notions of smooth functions, meaning "continuously differentiable n times" and "infinitely differentiable", respectively.
  • Upper-case C may also refer to any constant value within an equation.
• In metrology, c is the symbol for the cup, a unit of measurement of volume, used in cooking recipes in several countries.
• In music, C is a note; see also Middle C
• In nutrition, C is a vitamin
• In physics,
  • c is the speed of light in vacuum.
  • c can also be used for the speed of sound.
  • c is the symbol of the charm quark.
  • Upper-case C may also refer to any constant value within a physics equation.

Ć is the fifth letter of the Bosnian, Bunyev, Croatian and Polish alphabets, with the same position in the Serbian, Montenegrin and Macedonian versions of Latinic. It is formed by addition of an acute accent to the standard C letter used in most alphabets based on Latin script. It is also used in other alphabets: based on the Polish language, including the Belarusian Łacinka. Like its Latin counterpart, the Cyrillic alphabet has a specific symbol: Ћ, although this sign is only used in Serbian and Montenegrin Cyrillic, Macedonian uses Ќ. Other languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet usually represent this sound by a combination of letters often including a soft sign (ie. Russian Tь or Kь)

Its phonetic value is [ʨ] and it is used to represent the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate consonant.

See also

• Acute accent

Č is the fourth letter of the Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak and Slovenian alphabet and the fifth letter of the Lithuanian and Latvian alphabet. It is also used in the Latinic forms of Montenegrin, Macedonian and Serbian, all in fourth position. It is formed by addition of a caron to the standard C letter used in most alphabets based on Latin script. Like its Latin counterpart, the Cyrillic alphabet has a specific symbol: Ч.

Its phonetic value is [tʃ] and it is used to represent the voiceless postalveolar affricate consonant not unlike English ch in the word chocolate.