C in Different Fonts

C started as a G

C has the most tangled history in the first half of the alphabet. The Phoenician letter gimel (often linked to the word for camel) stood for a /g/ sound and became Greek gamma. The Etruscans, who passed the alphabet to Rome, didn’t distinguish /g/ from /k/, so they used their version of gamma for /k/. Latin inherited that, which is why C makes a /k/ sound in Latin words like Cicero (said “Kikero”).

The Romans then needed a separate letter for /g/ and made one by adding a bar to C, giving us G. A fossil of the old value survives in the Roman abbreviation C. for the name Gaius. The soft C sound in “city” came much later, from changes in late Latin and French.

C is one of the “borrowed” letters

In the mathematical alphabets, two styled capital C’s are not where you’d expect them. They live in the older Letterlike Symbols block because they were already used as symbols:

Unicode deliberately left holes in the newer block rather than encode ℂ and ℭ twice. The result is that ℭ can look a little different from 𝔄 or 𝔇 beside it in some fonts. If you want a perfectly even gothic word that starts with C, bold gothic 𝕮 has no borrowed letters at all, which is why the Old English text generator lists it first.

Choosing a C

C is an open curve, so styles with strong strokes give it the most character:

• Bold cursive 𝓒 / 𝓬: a full loop at the top; reads well as an initial. For how to write that loop by hand, see the cursive C page.
• Regular script 𝒞 / 𝒸: lighter and more calligraphic.
• Bold serif 𝐂 / 𝐜: the most legible bold, good for emphasis in posts.
• Double-struck ℂ / 𝕔: note the capital is the maths symbol, so it may appear in a slightly different weight from the lowercase.

Small C’s: where it gets subtle

C has small and tiny forms, but they don’t all look different from normal text:

• Small caps ᴄ (U+1D04) is almost indistinguishable from c. Small caps text such as ᴄᴏᴄᴏ will look like plain lowercase to most readers.
• Superscript ᶜ (U+1D9C) exists only in lowercase. Unicode has no modifier capital C, so generators use ᶜ for both cases.
• Subscript: none. C is not one of the 17 letters with a subscript form.

If you want C to look visibly smaller, superscript is the only real option. The small text generator shows which letters fall back to normal size.

Symbols that look like C

The look-alike styles use C-shaped characters with their own meanings: ₵ is the Ghanaian cedi sign, 匚 is a CJK radical meaning “box”, the Greek lunate sigma ϲ (U+03F2) is a plain c shape, and Cyrillic С / с (U+0421 / U+0441, the letter “es”) is identical to Latin C. Cyrillic с is one of the most common characters in spoofed domains and usernames, because it appears in so many English words. The Roman numeral Ⅽ (U+216D, one hundred) is yet another separate C.

Frequency

C makes up about 2.8% of letters in English text, roughly level with U. It is frequent at the start of words (can, come, could), so in styled sentences a mismatched capital C is easy to spot.