The letter C in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1 and 4 make a horizontal pair across the top. c and b are the same two dots rotated, which is why beginners mix them up; the direction of the pair is the whole distinction.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and C is part of the family that starts with c. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning C on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. All twenty-six letters are laid out family by family.

Move it down a row and it becomes punctuation

Take the shape of C and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5, and so on. The result is colon.

This is how the punctuation marks were built, which makes them much less work to learn than they look: if you know the first ten letters you already know the shapes, and only have to remember they sit lower in the cell. The full punctuation table follows the same pattern.

C is also the digit 3

The first ten letters double as the digits. Put a number sign — dots 3-4-5-6 — in front, and every letter that follows reads as a number until a space or a letter sign ends the run. So C on its own is the letter, but after a number sign it is 3.

This is the single commonest source of confusion for people reading braille numbers — a run of digits takes one number sign at the start, not one per digit. How braille numbers work covers the whole rule.

Where C turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, C is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “can”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary c. That is the rule beginners trip on most: can is a single cell, but the c in a word like “cat” is just a letter.

A contraction is one cell doing the work of two or more letters, which is why a Grade 2 page is roughly a quarter shorter than the same text in Grade 1. The complete Grade 2 reference lists all of them with the position rules that govern when they may be used.

Writing a capital C

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital C is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from C by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with C, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.