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| Word | Meaning | Eponym |
| caesarean | Short for caesarean section, the delivery of a child by surgery rather than through the birth canal. | Gaius Julius Caesar, one of Rome's greatest generals and politicians because he was born by caesarean section according to legend. |
| camellia | A plant with dark green waxy leaves and a waxy white flower known for its fragrance. | Named by Linnaeus after George Joseph Camel (1661-1706), a Moravian Jesuit missionary who did extensive botanical studies in the Philippines. |
| canfield | A game of solitaire similar to klondike. | Named after Richard Albert Canfield (1855–1914), an American gambler. |
| cardigan | A knit sweater that buttons in front. | James Thomas Brudnell, 7th Earl of Cardigan (1797-1868), British cavalry officer. |
| casanova | A philanderer, gigolo, an irresponsible lover who has many affairs with women. | Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725-1798), Italian charlatan and social climber, who wrote several books, translated the Iliad but is most notorious for his History of my Life, which focuses on his many romantic conquests. |
| Celsius | A measure of temperature in which 0° is the temperature at which water freezes, and 100° the temperature at which it boils. | Anders Celsius (1701-1744), the Swedish astronomer and scientist who invented a thermometer with 0 for the boiling point and 100 for the freezing point of water. After his death in 1744 the scale was reversed to its present form. |
| cereal | Grain or food made from grain. | Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture. |
| chartreuse | An apple-green color. | The Grande-Chartreuse, chief monastery of the Carthusian order, which was founded in the 11th century near Grenoble, France and named for the mountain range in which it was built. After the apple-green liqueur produced by the monks there. |
| chateaubriand | A double-thick center cut of beef tenderloin. | Vicomte François René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), French writer, statesman, and beef connoisseur. |
| chauvinism | Passionate, absolute, single-minded devotion to a cause. | Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier in Napoleon's army famous for his fanatical devotion to the Emperor. |
| chesterfield | 1. A couch or sofa (Canadian). 2. A men's overcoat with concealed buttons and a fur collar. | One of the 19th century Earls of Chesterfield (probably). |
| cicerone | A tourist guide. | Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), Roman orator and statesman. |
| cinchona | The shrub whose bark is the source of quinine, also called Jesuit's bark and Peruvian bark. | Purportedly named for the Countess Ana de Chinchón (1576-1641), Spanish viceroy of Peru. |
| clarence | A four-wheeled closed carriage for four. | The Duke of Clarence (1765-1837), who later became King William IV. |
| clausius | A unit of entropy: the extent to which heat or energy in a physical system becomes unvailable for performing work. | German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888), who introduced and named the concept of entropy in 1850. |
| clerihew | A humorous verse of two rhyming couplets about a famous person named in one of the rhymes. | Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), the British novelist famous for writing them. |
| Colombia | A South American country and the name of many cities around the world. | Christofor Columbus (1451-1506), the Italian discoverer of the America in 1492. |
| comstockery | Censorship of perceived immorality or obscenity. | Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), a world-class book-burner and moral crusader and a former US Postal Inspector who was dedicated to enforcing the ideas of strict Victorian morality; . |
| cordoba | Basic monetary unit of Nicaragua. | Francisco Fernandez de Córdoba (circa 1475-1526), a Spanish soldier and explorer. |
| coulomb | A measure of electrical current equal to 1 ampere in 1 second. | Charles Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), a French physicist best known for the formulation of Coulomb's law, that the force between two electrical charges is proportional to the product of the charges. |
| curie | A unit of radioactivity equal to the amount of a radioactive isotope that decays at the rate of 3.7 x 1010 disintegrations per second. | Named in honour of Pierre Curie (1859-1906), codiscoverer with his wife Marie of radium. |
| Cyrillic | The alphabet used by Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian. | St. Cyril (826-869) who, with St. Methodius, invented the first Slavic alphabet (actually Glagolitic; Cyrillic itself came along 50 years later). |
| czar | The former king of Russia. | An Old Slavic variation of Caesar. (See also tsar and kaiser.) |
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