54

A lot of people will interchange an "o" for a zero when speaking them aloud, like with phone numbers and postal codes, so I'm thinking this is the same here, but with nicknames like "threepio", I'm not so sure.

I'm looking for the canon answer here.

Rand al'Thor
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Kyle Falconer
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    Google certainly thinks its "C-3PO" (O for Orange, not 0 for the balance of my bank account). – TZHX Apr 17 '15 at 18:49
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    It always bothered me that they were 4 character serial numbers. That doesn't add up to very many unique droid names. – Sobrique Apr 17 '15 at 19:56
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    @Sobrique I always assumed (for my own sanity) that they were the head or tail of a longer serial code. Much like git tags are frequently reduced to only a few characters instead of the full hash. – agweber Apr 17 '15 at 20:08
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    See http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/22658/is-there-only-one-r2-d2-droid-in-the-galaxy-or-were-other-r2-d2-droids-made for more discussion on droid naming conventions – Jacob Krall Apr 17 '15 at 20:11
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    @Sobrique actually, it's a five digit serial number. The dash itself is a character. Notice C-3PO vs. R2-D2, the dash is in a different place. And some types of droids had much longer names/codes. – Omegacron Apr 17 '15 at 20:18
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    Also see http://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/55876/19561 for more musings about C-3PO's name. – SQB Apr 17 '15 at 20:18
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    @Sobrique I always thought they were model names, not serial numbers; i.e. there could be many C-3POs. – smci Apr 18 '15 at 00:01
  • @agweber And of course people even shorten those short designations, much like how my friends shorten "fluffy" (which is my real-life nickname) to "fluffs." Or sometimes lengthen it to "flufferson" for some reason. – fluffy Apr 18 '15 at 06:03
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    @smci While the canonicity of The Phantom Menace is debated, in that movie they refer to R2-D2 as being the designation of that specific unit at the end. – fluffy Apr 18 '15 at 06:04
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    @fluffy thanks, but the only place I want to see The Phantom Menace is in the stomach of a Sarlacc Beast. – smci Apr 18 '15 at 20:04
  • @Omegacron: I can only agree with that by 50%. Yes, in its written form, it's a five digit serial number, but unless we have heard droid names being spoken like see-dash-three-pee-oh or ar-two-dash-dee-two, we should assume that the dash is somehow considered irrelevant for identification by the people of a galaxy far, far way. – O. R. Mapper Apr 18 '15 at 23:05
  • I was about to ask this exact question. +1 – Rand al'Thor Jan 26 '16 at 21:54
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    I don't see a canon answer however since R2D2 goes Letter, number,letter number, if you apply the same format to C3P0, then the last character is a zero and people simply call it o because it's easier (which is incorrectly propagated by future writers of the series itself) – chrisfs Apr 07 '18 at 20:54

2 Answers2

55

The script spells it with an 'O':

An explosion rocks the ship as two robots, Artoo-Detoo (R2-D2) and See-Threepio (C-3PO) struggle to make their way through the shaking, bouncing passageway. Both robots are old and battered. Artoo is a short, claw-armed tripod. His face is a mass of computer lights surrounding a radar eye. Threepio, on the other hand, is a tall, slender robot of human proportions. He has a gleaming bronze-like metallic surface of an Art Deco design.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

Although I can't find his designation used anywhere in the text of the novelization, the 1979 paperback has an inset featuring stills from the movie and short character bios; Threepio's designation appears there as "C-3PO" (with an 'O', not a '0'):

A faded scan of an old book

It's faded, but you can clearly see an 'O'.

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Jason Baker
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    Although I think you're right, where's the evidence that that's a O in that font and not a 0? – ThePopMachine Mar 08 '18 at 22:00
  • @ThePopMachine While I can't be certain, the font appears to be either Futura or Twentieth Century, which have very distinctive O and 0 characters. The capital O in these fonts have an equal width and height. – Dale Harris Dec 10 '19 at 02:43
  • "Threepio" - now that raises the question of why it's not pronounced "three - pie - oh" instead of "three-pee-oh". – FreeMan Oct 20 '23 at 17:55
33

StarWars.com, the scripts, and the novelization all explicitly say it is C-3PO.

To confirm this, I copy-pasted the text from the StarWars.com page shown below and then typed it out with a zero instead in a font that distinguishes the two characters. You can see the difference in fonts.

"C-3PO" – directly from starwars.com

"C-3P0" – typed with a zero-character

threepio

Similarly to this, I checked the novelization and the scripts. Searching for "C-3PO" returns numerous results. Searching for "C-3P0" returns none.

David Richerby
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phantom42
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