How to type C with Cedilla
To type C with Cedilla (ç), press Alt + 0231 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + C on Mac, or write ç in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00E7 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00e7 on Linux, or 00e7 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter C With Cedilla
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00E7
- Windows
- Alt + 0231
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0231 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + C | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ç | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00E7 | LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA |
Other accents symbols
ç lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
ç has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+0063 Latin Small Letter C, U+0327 Combining Cedilla. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing ç sometimes fails against text that was typed on a different system. Everything on this site uses the single-codepoint (NFC) form shown here.
Its uppercase counterpart is Ç (U+00C7). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
Typing ç without switching keyboard
ç is the letter C carrying a cedilla, and it is needed in French and Portuguese. It is one character rather than two: a spell checker treats it as a letter of those alphabets, not as C with something added.
Both of the routes worth knowing compose the letter rather than looking it up. On a Mac press Option + C, let go, then press c: nothing appears until the second key, because the first one is a dead key waiting for a letter to sit under. On Windows the same idea needs the United States-International layout, which turns the apostrophe key, then c into the same dead key. Add that layout once under Language and region, and ç costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.
How C with Cedilla behaves in software
ç takes one column in a terminal. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
Every way to write C with Cedilla
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00E7 |
| Decimal | 231 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 A7 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 E7 |
| HTML entity | ç |
| HTML numeric | ç or ç |
| CSS | \00E7 |
| JavaScript | \u00E7 |
| Python | \u00E7 |
| URL-encoded | %C3%A7 |
| SVG | 00E7.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ç arrives as ç
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 A7 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00E7.