C

C++ and C# redirect here. Due to technical limitations, the articles on C++ and C# programming languages are located at C plus plus and C Sharp. For information about the musical note C♯, see musical notation

Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

C (lowercase c) is the third letter of the Roman alphabet. Its name in English is cee.

In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek Γ (Gamma) was used to represent /k/. In the beginning, the Romans used C for both /k/ and /g/, only later adding a horizontal bar at right-center to produce G. It is possible but uncertain that C represented only /g/ at an even earlier time, while K might have been used for /k/.

Some scholars claim that the Semitic ג (gîmel) pictured a camel, but most assume it was probably gaml (a throwing stick/boomerang).

Other alphabets have letters identical to C in form but not in use and derivation, in particular the Cyrillic letter Es which derives from one form of the Greek letter sigma, known as the "lunate sigma" from its resemblance to a crescent moon.

Phonetic use

/k/ developed palatal and velar allophones in Latin, probably due to Etruscan influence. 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 E, I, or Y. Romance languages obey similar rules, but the soft value is different in several languages, taking on /θ/ in European Castilian and /ʧ/ (like English CH) in Italian and Romanian.

Other languages use C with different values, such as /k/ regardless of position in Irish, Welsh, /θ/ in Fijian, /ʤ/ in Turkish, Tatar, Azeri, /ʧ/ in Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, /ʦ/ in Czech, Croatian, Esperanto, Hungarian, Polish, Romanized Chinese, Serbian.

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 /x/, usually when transliterating Greek Χ or Hebrew. CH takes various values in other languages, such as /ç/, /k/, or /x/ in German, /ʃ/ in French, /k/ in 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/.

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.

Alternative representations

Charlie represents the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

In international Morse code the letter C is DahDitDahDit: - · - ·

In Braille the letter C is represented as ⠉ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,

XX
..
..

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 and for lowercase c is 131.
• The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "C" and "c" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings for 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 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.
• In business, C is a "creation" initial. It is used for the company name etc. in many Japanese companies.
• 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++, Objective-C, and 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 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 is often used as a digit meaning twelve in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 13 or greater.
  • 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.
• In the SI system,
  • c, centi, is an SI prefix meaning 1/100.
  • C is the symbol for coulomb, the SI derived unit for electric charge.
• In music, C is a note; see also Middle C
• In nutrition, C is a vitamin; see Vitamin C
• 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.
• As the first letter of a postal code,
  • In Canada, C stands for Prince Edward Island.
• In publishing, c with an enclosing circle, ©, denotes copyright
• In rail transport, C is the UIC classification for the railroad locomotive wheel arrangement known as 0-6-0 in the Whyte notation; a locomotive with three powered axles (and thus six wheels) in which the axles are linked by gearing or side rods.
• In Roman naming convention, C is the abbreviation for the praenomen Gaius.
• In Roman numerals, C denotes one hundred (centum in Latin; there are also separate Unicode characters for this number, U+216D "Ⅽ" and U+217D "ⅽ").
• In Canadian television, the C rating indicates a program intended to be viewed by children.
• In temperature, °C is the symbol for degrees Celsius (there is also a separate Unicode character for this symbol, U+2103 "℃").
• As a timezone, C is the military designation for UTC+3, also known as MSK or Moscow Time.
• In economics, C is usually used to represent consumption.
• In Microsoft Windows, Ctrl-C, (in Mac OS, Command-C) copies the selected text, image or sound and places it on the clipboard.
• In Unix/Linux terminals, Ctrl-C kills the current action.

See also

• Ç, Ĉ, ¢, Č, Ć
• С : Es (Cyrillic)