G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee or occasionally ge ()."G" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "gee," op. cit. History The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar from voiceless . The recorded originator of the letter G is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, K had fallen out of favour, and C, which had formerly expressed both and before open vowels, had come to express in all environments. Ruga's positioning of G shows that alphabetic order, related to the letters' values as Greek numerals, was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Sampson (1985) suggested that: "E