&lt;p&gt;It was based on the B language, which had been created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1969. In 1972, they planned to rewrite Unix in B, but then decided they needed a new version of the language that could do things such as byte addressability. The next version of B should be called C, the next letter after B.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So why was B named B? B was a cut-down version of BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language). Its name might be just a short version of BCPL, but Dennis Ritchie always maintained that it was named after Bonnie, Ken Thompson&amp;rsquo;s wife.&lt;/p&gt;