added to the Latin alphabet in the third century BC.
G
one of the very few letters with a name attached to it. The tradition, from Plutarch, credits a Roman schoolmaster, Spurius Carvilius Ruga, with adding a stroke to C to separate [g] from [k]; the new letter took the slot Z had vacated. Scholars argue whether he invented it or standardised a split already under way — the date is traditional, not documented.
Aguilar · Armstrong · Cunningham · Delgado · Douglas · Ferguson · Fitzgerald · Gallagher · Garcia · Gardner · Gibson · Glover · Gomez · Gonzales
In the modern alphabet this letter is number 7 of 26. Before it comes F, after it H. 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.
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 18 and closes 4. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 6. The surname carrying the most of it is Gallagher, with 2.
George · Margaret · Grace · Angela · Douglas · Gregory