Q

For other uses of "Q", see Q (disambiguation).

Look up Q, q in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Q (pronounced /kjuː/) is the seventeenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph wj	Phoenician Q	Etruscan Q	Greek Qoppa
V24

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. The Etruscans used Q only 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, 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. In Italian qu represents [kw] (where [w] is an allophone of /u/); in German, /kv/; and in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Spanish, and Catalan, /k/ or /kw/. (In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan and French, qu replaces c for /k/ before front vowels i and e, since in those contexts c is a fricative and letter \'k\' is seldom used outside loan words.) In Albanian, q represents the voiceless palatal plosive, /c/. In the Aymara, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] is also used in the IPA for the voiceless uvular plosive, as well as in most transliteration schemes of Semitic languages for the "emphatic" qōp sound.

In Maltese and Võro, Q denotes the glottal stop.

In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, Q is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English "ch" in "cheese".

In Fijian, Q represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ].

In Xhosa and Zulu, Q represents the postalveolar click [kǃ].

Q, which is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it in English, is the second most rarely used letter in the English language.

The lowercase Q is usually written as a lowercase O with a line below it, with or without a "tail". It is usually typed without due to the major difference between the tails of the lowercase G and lowercase Q. It is usually written with the tail to distinguish from the G. Unlike the written lowercase G, which has a leftward facing tail, the Q\'s tail faces right. An example of the lowercase Q written from a keyboard is a "q".

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of Q

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Quebec		– – · –
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

In Unicode the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lower case q is U+0071.

The ASCII code for capital Q is 81 and for lowercase q is 113; or in binary 01010001 and 01110001, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital Q is 216 and for lowercase q is 152.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "Q" and "q" for upper and lower case respectively.