C is the third letter in the English and ISO Latin alphabets. Its English name is cee (pronounced / ˈsiː /), plural cees.

“C” comes from the same letter as “G.” The Semites named it gimel. The sign could have been adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for staff slingsling, which could have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel whose Semitic name was gamal. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states: “It is difficult to imagine how a gimel=” camel “can be extracted from a camel picture (it can show his hump, head, and neck!).

In the Etruscan language, flat consonants did not have a contrasting expression, so the Greek “Γ” (Gamma) was adopted in the Etruscan alphabet to represent / k /. Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took the form “Early Etruscan C.gif” in Early Etruscan, then “Classical Etruscan C.gif” in Classical Etruscan. In Latin, it eventually adopted the form “c” in Classical Latin. In the first Latin inscriptions, the letters “c k q” were used to represent the sounds / k / and / ɡ / (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, “q” is used to represent / k / or / ɡ / before a rounded vowel, “k” before “a” and “c” elsewhere. In the third century BC, a modified sign for / ɡ / was introduced, and “c” itself was reserved for / k /. The use of “c” (and its variant “g”) has replaced most uses of “k” and “q.” Therefore, in the classical period and beyond, “g” is treated as the Greek gamma equivalent and “c” as the kappa equivalent; this is seen in the romanization of the Greek words, as in “ΔΜΟΣΑΔΜΟΣ,” “ΚΥΡΟΣ” and “ΦΩΚΙΣ” they entered Latin as “cadmvs,” “cyrvs” and “phocis” respectively.

Other alphabets have homologous letters with “c” but are not analogous in use and derivation, such as the Cyrillic letter Es (C, c), which derives from the lunate sigma, named because of its resemblance to the crescent.

When the Roman alphabet was introduced in Great Britain, ⟨c⟩ represented only / k / and this value of the letter is kept in loans for all the Celtic insular languages: Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, ⟩c⟩ represents only / k /. The Old English writing system, based on Latin, was learned by the Celts, apparently from Ireland; therefore, ⟨c⟩ in Old English also originally represented / k /; the modern English words kin, break, broken, thick and search come from the Old English words written with ⟨c⟩: cyn, brecan, brocen, þicc and séoc. However, in Old English, / k / before the preceding vowels (/ e / and / i /) were palatalized, changing in the 10th century, although ⟨c⟩ was still used as in cir (i) ce, wrecc (e) a. Meanwhile, a similar phonetic change is taking place on the continent (for example, in Italian).

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