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I feel like an old timer knowing this, but it stands for Carbon Copy.

In the old days - long before computers and long before the first copy machine, people would type on manual typewriters, and sometimes they'd want there to be a copy.

So they would put two papers in the typewriter, with a sheet of carbon paper between them, so that as they typed, a copy would be being made on the second paper.

They would send the original to whoever it needed to go to, but at the bottom, after the closing signature, they would put:

cc: File

or

cc: Dr. Smith

or to whoever needed a copy.

Later, when copies were easily made by the new Xerox machine, carbon copies were obsolete.

But whenever an original paper was going to be copied and sent to others, the old habit didn't die. If one was sending the original to someone, they would still put cc at the end, but this time like so:

cc: File, Dr. Smith, Human Resources

For you see we could now copy to almost anyone! But due to social inertia, we didn't change it to "cs" for "copies sent", or "cm" for "copies made". No, it was still "cc" for "carbon copy".

Now comes, decades after that, the electronic mail called email, yet we still use cc as we did with old fashioned Xeroxes, which was as we did with old fashioned carbon paper!

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15y ago

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