The voiced velar stop was represented by the third letter of the Greek alphabet, gamma (Γ), which was later adopted by the Etruscan language.

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.

According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.

"[5] George Hempl proposed in 1899 that there never was such a "space" in the alphabet and that in fact 'G' was a direct descendant of zeta.

In the double-storey version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear".

The loop-tail form is the original one, as seen in 9th century Carolingian script; evolving over centuries of monastic copying, the open-tail variant came to predominate and it was this that Gutenberg adopted when creating the first Blackletter typefaces – until that in turn was replaced by Humanist minuscule, which reasserted the closed-tail form.

For applications where the single-storey variant must be distinguished (such as strict IPA in a typeface where the usual g character is double-storey), the character U+0261 ɡ LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G is available, as well as an upper case version, U+A7AC Ɡ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G. Occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast.

[11] While the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommended the use of ⟨⟩ for a velar plosive and ⟨ɡ⟩ for an advanced one for languages where it is preferable to distinguish the two, such as Russian,[12] this practice never caught on.

[13] The 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the successor to the Principles, abandoned the recommendation and acknowledged both shapes as acceptable variants.

There remain widely used a few English words of non-Romance origin where ⟨g⟩ is hard followed by ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ (get, give, gift, gig, girl, giggle), and very few in which ⟨g⟩ is soft though followed by ⟨a⟩ such as gaol, which since the 20th century is almost always written as "jail".

The double consonant ⟨gg⟩ has the value /ɡ/ (hard ⟨g⟩) as in nugget, with very few exceptions: /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate and veggies and dialectally /ɡd͡ʒ/ in suggest.

In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, a sound somewhat similar to the ⟨ny⟩ in English canyon.

In Italian, the trigraph ⟨gli⟩, when appearing before a vowel or as the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/.