Q


Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

Q ( /ˈkjuː/; named cue^[1]) is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

1 History
2 Usage
3 Related letters and other similar characters
4 Computing codes
5 Other representations
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

History

Egyptian hieroglyph wj	Phoenician qoph	Etruscan Q	Greek Qoppa

The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was /q/ (voiceless uvular plosive), a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones. In Greek, this sign as Qoppa Ϙ probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ respectively. Therefore, Qoppa was transformed into two letters: Qoppa, which stood for a number only, and Phi Φ which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek.

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel (e.g. "EQO" = ego), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.^[2]

The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/

Usage

In most modern western languages written in Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, ⟨q⟩ appears almost exclusively in the digraph ⟨qu⟩ (e.g. quick, quit, quack), though see Q without U.

In English this digraph most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in plaque. Q is the second most rarely used letter in the English alphabet. In script written English, the capital Q is very close in appearance to a 2, and many people use the print Q instead.
In Italian ⟨qu⟩ represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the semivowel allophone of /u/)
In Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, ⟨qu⟩ represents /k/ or /kw/; ⟨qu⟩ replaces ⟨c⟩ for /k/ before front vowels ⟨i⟩ and ⟨e⟩, since in those languages 'c' represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels.

In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, ⟨q⟩ is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English ⟨ch⟩ in "cheese", but pronounced further toward the front of the mouth.

In Fijian, ⟨q⟩ represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ].

In Greenlandic, ⟨q⟩ represents the voiceless uvular plosive [q].

In Azeri, ⟨q⟩ represents the voiced velar plosive [g].

In Uyghur (Latin script), ⟨q⟩ represents the voiceless uvular plosive [q].

In Xhosa and Zulu, ⟨q⟩ represents the postalveolar click [kǃ].

In Kiowa, ⟨q⟩ represents a glottalized velar plosive [kʼ].

In Võro and Maltese, ⟨q⟩ represents the glottal stop [ʔ].

The lowercase Q is usually seen as a lowercase O with a descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish), even a reversed lowercase p. The lowercase Q's descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the lowercase G (a loop) and lowercase Q (vertical). The descender of the lowercase Q is sometimes handwritten finishing with a rightward swash to distinguish from the leftward facing curved descender on the lowercase G.

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

character	Q		q
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q		LATIN SMALL LETTER Q
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	81	0051	113	0071
UTF-8	81	51	113	71
Numeric character reference	Q	Q	q	q
ASCII ¹	81	51	113	71
EBCDIC family	216	D8	152	98

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Quebec	– – · –


Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

References

^ "Q" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "que," op. cit.
^ Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (illustrated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 21. ISBN 0195083458. http://books.google.com/books?id=IeHmqKY2BqoC.

External links

Media related to Q at Wikimedia Commons
The Wiktionary entry for Q
The Wiktionary entry for q

Letter Q with diacritics

Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Ɋɋ	Ƣƣ	ʠ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646

Q

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