cedilla
/səˈdɪlə/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
Example Sentences
- "California, like several other states, prohibits the use of diacritical marks or accents on official documents. That means no tilde (~), no accent grave (`), no umlaut (¨) and certainly no cedilla (¸)."
- "The scribal discipline indicated by this sort of consistency extends to such details as the employment of different forms of cedilla appended to the letter e to distinguish between diphthong ae and diphthong oe."
- "Teresa Webber and Malcolm Parkes have both remarked on its use by the Canterbury scribe Eadmer in the twelfth century, who went so far as to distinguish cedillae indicating oe from cedillae indicating ae."
- "The following ligatures are the principal ones to be encountred in early Caroligian script: (a) ae, consisting of Carolingian e to which a Cursive a in the shape of u or cc or a simple hook is suspended; the ‘cedilla’ in this e caudata would soon be no longer understood as representing the letter a and would take various forms, before disappearing in the course of the twelfth century; [...]."
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).
Inflected Forms
cedillas (plural)
cedillae (plural)
Derived Forms
Frequently Paired Words
ç
ogonek