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From Wikipedia: ‹C› is the third letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈsiː/) is spelled cee, plural cees.‹C› comes from the same letter as ‹g›. The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal.In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek ‹Γ› (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent /k/. Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a ‹› form in Early Etruscan, then ‹› in Classical Etruscan. In Latin it eventually took the ‹c› form in Classical Latin. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters ‹c k q› were used to represent the sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, ‹q› was used to represent /k/ or /ɡ/ before a rounded vowel, ‹k› before ‹a›, and ‹c› elsewhere. During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for /ɡ/, and ‹c› itself was retained for /k/. The use of ‹c› (and its variant ‹g›) replaced most usages of ‹k› and ‹q›. Hence, in the classical period and after, ‹g› was treated as the equivalent of Greek gamma, and ‹c› as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek words, as in ‹KA∆MOΣ›, ‹KYPOΣ›, and ‹ΦΩKIΣ› came into latin as ‹cadmvs›, ‹cyrvs›, and ‹phocis›, respectively. See more...

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48: Gastropoda \Gas*trop"o*da\, n. pl., [NL., fr. Gr. ?, ?, stomach + -poda.] (Zool.) One of the classes of Mollusca, of great extent. It includes most of the marine spiral shells, and the land and fresh-water snails. They generally creep by means of a flat, muscular disk, or foot, on the ventral side of the body. The head usually bears one or two pairs of tentacles. See Mollusca. [Written also Gasteropoda.] [1913 Webste ... See more description