C Facts For Kids

The letter C (uppercase C or lowercase c) is the third letter of the Latin alphabet. Its name is “cee.” People use it in English and in many other languages around the world. Sometimes it stands for a sound like the letter S, and sometimes it stands for a sound like the letter K. Because it can do two jobs, learning when it makes each sound helps you read and spell better.

Writers and speakers also join C with other letters to make new sounds. Below you will read about how C works in English, how other languages use it, and how it pairs up with other letters.

In English, C usually has two main sounds. The soft c sounds like S before the letters E, I, and Y — for example, "cent," "city," and "cycle." The hard c sounds like K in words such as "cat," "cup," and "clock," and often appears before A, O, U, or at the end of a word.

There are a few exceptions. Some words keep the K sound where you might expect S (like "soccer" or "Celt"). Also, combinations with C help make other sounds: "ch" usually makes the CH sound in "chair," "tch" makes it in "catch," and "ck" often makes K after a short vowel in words like "duck."

Other languages use C in different ways. In French, Portuguese, and many other Romance languages, C before E or I usually sounds like S (for example, French "cent"). In Spanish, the soft C can sound like the English S in Latin America or like the TH in Spain (so "cinco" can sound like "thin-co" in some places). In Italian and Romanian, C before E or I sounds like the CH in "cheese" (for example, Italian "ciao").

Some languages use C for a sound like the TS in "cats" (Polish and many Slavic languages), and other languages use it for sounds like J in "judge" (Turkish). People who write other alphabets sometimes use C when they change words into the Latin letters.

A digraph is when two letters join to make one sound. C appears in many digraphs and even in three-letter groups called trigraphs. A common pair is "ch," which usually makes the CH sound in "chair." But "ch" can also sound like K in "chorus" or like SH in "machine," depending on the word's history.

Other examples: "ck" often stands for K after a short vowel, as in "duck;" "tch" (a trigraph) gives the CH in "catch;" and in German the three letters "sch" make the SH sound like in "ship." Different languages use pairs like "cz" or "cs" for their own special sounds.

When the Romans brought the letter C to Britain, it always stood for a hard /k/ sound, like in "cat." Old English kept that hard sound at first, but over time people began to say it differently before the front vowels /e/ and /i/. This change is called palatalization — the tongue moves a bit toward the front — and it made C sound more like the ch in "church" in some words.

Later, when the Normans brought new spellings, letters such as k, qu, and the pair ch appeared. By about the 1200s, many words with C before e or i had shifted to a soft /s/ sound, which is why English and other Romance languages have both hard and soft C sounds today.

The letter C is used for things besides sounds. In the counting system called hexadecimal, which people use in computing, the symbol C stands for the number twelve. That system uses 16 different symbols instead of 10.

In old number writing, C also means one hundred as a Roman numeral. And as a tiny symbol for measurement, the letter c (short for "centi-") means one hundredth. For example, 1 centimetre (1 cm) equals 0.01 metres — that is one hundredth of a metre.

Letters must be shown correctly on screens and in books, so computers give each one a number. The capital C is stored as U+0043 and the small c as U+0063 in the system called Unicode. These same numbers were used earlier in simpler systems like ASCII, so old and new computers agree about which number is C.

There are also special versions of C with marks above or below it, like Č or ç. Some are stored as single codes (precomposed) and others are made by adding a mark after C (combining), so computers can show many written languages.

Letters change shape over thousands of years. A very old Semitic letter called Gimel (𐤂) helped make the Greek letter Gamma (Γ, γ) and later influenced Latin letters. From those shapes came both C and G in different times, so they are like cousins in the letter family tree.

Another older Latin form, called yogh (Ȝ, ȝ), came from letters related to G and shows how shapes moved and changed. Today computers can show these ancient symbols because Unicode gives every one its own number, so people studying writing can compare old and new forms on screens.