cedilla
/səˈdɪlə/ noun
Forms cedillas cedillae
- noun (orthography) A diacritical mark ⟨¸⟩ placed beneath a letter to modify its pronunciation, used in the orthographies of many languages, such as under c in Catalan, French and Portuguese to indicate /s/ rather than /k/ (e.g. Catalan força, French menaçant, Portuguese almoço) and in other languages to modify the pronunciation of the letter c (e.g. from /d͡ʒ/ to /t͡ʃ/ in Turkish) or of other letters.
- noun (by extension, palaeography) Synonym of cauda
Synonyms
Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish cedilla (literally “little zed”), c. 1600. In Spanish cedilla referred to the letter ⟨Ç⟩, which had evolved from ⟨Ꝣ⟩, a Visigothic form of the letter Z (called a Z with copete); hence the name. The lower part of ⟨Ç⟩ (which came to be reinterpreted as a diacritical mark under a C) is the remnant of the original Z, after it gradually reduced in size; whereas the upper part was originally just an ornamentation over the Z (which increased in size until it resembled letter C, and finally came to be identified with this letter).
Webster’s 1913
- noun A mark placed under the letter c [thus, ç], to show that it is to be sounded like s, as in façade.
Etymology [Sp. cedilla, cf. F. cédille; dim. of zeta, the Gr. name of the letter z, because this letter was formerly written after the c, to give it the sound of s.]
Sources: Wiktionary · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “cedilla”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details