ccedilla

Ccedilla is a Latin-script letter formed by adding a cedilla below the letter c, written as ç in lowercase and Ç in uppercase. The diacritic changes the value of the letter in various orthographies, and the character is treated as a distinct letter in several alphabets.

In French, ç denotes a soft /s/ sound before a, e, i, o, or u, as in ça, garçon, and français. In Portuguese, it commonly represents /s/ before a, o, e, as in coração and seções. In Turkish, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Azerbaijani, Albanian, and related languages, ç usually represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/ as in çay (tea) and çok (much).

Unicode encodes ç and Ç as U+00E7 and U+00C7, respectively. In HTML, the character can be written as ç for lowercase and Ç for uppercase. In typography, the cedilla is a distinct diacritic and may require font support to render correctly; poorly designed fonts can produce an uneven or detached appearance.

Etymology and naming trace back to the French cédille, meaning a small cedilla. The term cedilla itself comes from a diminutive form related to the base word for “little.” The symbol is used wherever the orthographies of different languages require a c that does not follow the normal hard /k/ or soft /s/ patterns.

Typing ç or Ç can be done via extended Latin keyboard layouts, or by using Unicode input (U+00E7 / U+00C7) or appropriate character codes on various systems.