ONOMA

The letter C

Greek gamma, through Etruscan.

C

origin: Greek gamma, through Etruscan
carried no numeric value
in surnames: 61 / 315 (19%)
opens 26 surnames in the corpus

for centuries C spelled both [k] and [g] in Latin, which is why the name Gaius was abbreviated as C. The Romans lived with one letter for two sounds until somebody fixed it.

examples from the corpus

Archer · Becker · Bianchi · Black · Cameron · Campbell · Carpenter · Carroll · Carter · Casey · Castillo · Chambers · Chandler · Chapman

Its place in the row

In the modern alphabet this letter is number 3 of 26. Before it comes B, after it D. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.

What this letter does in a name

This is a consonant: it sets the hardness of a name and how it meets the next word. In a corpus of 315 surnames this letter opens 26 and closes 0. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 25. The surname carrying the most of it is Ricci, with 2.

Michael · Richard · Charles · Christopher · Jacob · Nicholas · Eric · Patrick · Jack · Lucas · Grace · Jessica

Letters from the same source

These letters came from the Greek alphabet.

ABDEHIKLMNOPQRSTXYZ

The whole alphabet

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Read a name

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