Why use c() to define vector?

Question

c is not the abbreviation of vector in English, so why use c() to define a vector in R?

v1<- c(1,2,3,4,5) 

Answer 1

This is a good question, and the answer is kind of odd. "c", believe it or not, stands for "combine", which is what it normally does:

> c(c(1, 2), c(3)) [1] 1 2 3 

But it happens that in R, a number is just a vector of length 1:

> 1 [1] 1 

So, when you use c() to create a vector, what you are actually doing is combining together a series of 1-length vectors.