G in Different Fonts

A made-up letter

Most Latin letters arrived ready-made from Greek via the Etruscans. G didn’t. Early Latin used C for both the /k/ and /g/ sounds, inherited from the Etruscans who had no /g/ at all. Around the 3rd century BC the Romans added a short stroke to C to tell them apart, and the result was G. Ancient sources credit the change to Spurius Carvilius Ruga.

The new letter needed a place, and it took the seventh position, where Z had sat in the Greek order. Z was rarely needed in Latin and had been dropped; it was later brought back for Greek loanwords and put at the end. So the ancestor of G is really gimel (the Phoenician source of Greek gamma and Latin C), with a Roman modification.

Two lowercase g’s

Lowercase g has two very different shapes, and the styled alphabets mix them:

Which one you see depends partly on the font your device uses, so the same bold serif 𝐠 can look different on iPhone and Android. Handwriting nearly always uses the open-tail form, and the cursive g is the version with a looped descender; the cursive G page walks through both the capital and lowercase strokes.

The borrowed script g

The script lowercase g is ℊ (U+210A), one of eleven letters the math script alphabet borrows from Letterlike Symbols. Like ℯ and ℴ, it can come out looking lighter or more upright than the rest of the word. The capital 𝒢 is native. That creates a quirk: in regular script, the capital G matches perfectly but the lowercase doesn’t, the reverse of B, F or H.

If your name has a g in it, compare:

• Script: 𝒢ℯℴ𝓇ℊ𝒾𝒶 (three borrowed letters: e, o and g)
• Bold script: 𝓖𝓮𝓸𝓻𝓰𝓲𝓪 (no borrowed letters)

The cursive text generator shows both versions of any name you type.

Gothic G

Fraktur and bold Fraktur give G one of their most ornate capitals, 𝔊 and 𝕲. At small sizes on a phone, 𝕲 can read as an S or a C to people unfamiliar with blackletter. If you use the Old English text generator for a name starting with G, preview it at the size your platform shows names.

Small G and missing G

• Small caps ɢ (U+0262) is from IPA Extensions and well supported.
• Superscript ᴳ (U+1D33) and ᵍ (U+1D4D) both exist.
• Subscript: none. G isn’t among the 17 letters with a subscript form.

G in symbols and look-alikes

• ₲ (currency style) is the Paraguayan guaraní sign (U+20B2).
• ⅁ (upside-down capital) is TURNED SANS-SERIF CAPITAL G (U+2141), from Letterlike Symbols, and ƃ is used for the flipped lowercase.
• Ꮐ (Cherokee style) is the Cherokee syllable “nah”, which just happens to look like G.
• ᚷ (runic) is gebo, the Elder Futhark rune for /g/, so that one matches.
• ɠ (squiggle) is a G with hook, used in phonetics for an implosive sound.

Unlike A, C or E, capital G has no common identical twin in Cyrillic or Greek, so it is less often used for spoofing.

Frequency

G is about 2.0% of English letters, tied with Y. It’s most common at word ends in -ing, so styled verbs show off whichever lowercase g your style uses.