Cedilla Meaning: The Little Hook Under the Letter

Cedilla meaning and what the mark does

A cedilla is a diacritic, a small sign added to a letter to change its sound or meaning. It hangs below the letter like a little comma with a curl. Its job depends on the language:

• French, Portuguese and Catalan: ç is always said like "s". It appears before a, o and u, where a plain c would sound like "k". Before e and i a plain c already sounds like "s", so no cedilla is needed.
• Turkish: ç sounds like "ch" in chair, and ş sounds like "sh" in ship. These are separate letters of the alphabet, not just decorated ones.
• Albanian and Azerbaijani: ç also stands for a "ch" sound.

So the cedilla does not have one fixed sound. It is a signal that says "this letter is not pronounced the usual way".

Words with a cedilla

English keeps the cedilla in a handful of borrowed words such as façade and soupçon (a tiny amount), but most people now type them without it. See our page on facade for that word's meaning.

From a little z to a little hook

The word comes from Spanish cedilla, a diminutive of ceda, an old Spanish name for the letter z. So cedilla literally means "little z". It appears in English in a Spanish and English dictionary from 1599.

The mark itself grew out of medieval Spanish handwriting. Scribes wrote a small z under or after a c to show it should sound like "ts" rather than "k". Over time the z shrank into a simple hook, giving ç. The sign spread to French printing in the 1500s and later to many other languages. Modern Spanish, interestingly, no longer uses ç at all; it writes z or c instead.

Using the word in sentences

• Don't forget the cedilla when you write garçon in your French homework.
• The sign painter left off the cedilla, so the café menu read "francais".
• In Turkish class we learned that the cedilla turns s into a "sh" sound.
• Our school database could not store cedillas, so several student names showed up wrong.
• She pointed to the little hook under the c and asked her teacher what it was called; the answer was a cedilla.

Cedilla compared with other marks

Several marks look a little like a cedilla but have different names:

• Comma below: Romanian ș and ț use a small comma under the letter. For years computers showed them with cedillas instead, and the two are still often mixed up.
• Ogonek: a hook under a vowel, as in Polish ą and ę, curving the other way and marking a nasal sound.
• Tilde: the wavy line above ñ or ã.
• Caret: the pointed hat over a letter, as in â; see caret.

Our grammar and writing hub lists more punctuation terms, and the noun page covers a basic part of speech.

How to type ç

On most phone keyboards, press and hold the c key, then slide to ç in the menu that pops up. Many computer keyboard layouts for French, Portuguese or Turkish have a dedicated ç key. On a standard English layout, you can use your system's character viewer or an international keyboard setting, or copy the character from a symbol list. In web pages, the code ç produces ç.

If you cannot type it, writing a plain c is widely understood in English, but in names and foreign words the cedilla is more correct and more respectful.