Q (named cue /kjuː/) is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet and the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide.
History and Origins
The letter Q traces its origins to the Semitic letter qoph (𐤒), which represented a voiceless uvular stop /q/ — a sound common to Semitic languages but not found in most European languages. The form of the letter may have been based on the eye of a needle, a knot, or a monkey with its tail hanging down. Like other glyphs derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script, the letter has been suggested to have roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In early Ancient Greek, the letter qoppa (Ϙ) came to represent several labialized velar stops, including /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. Due to later sound shifts, these sounds changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ in Greek, and qoppa was transformed into two letters: qoppa (used for the number 90) and phi (Φ).
The Etruscans used Q with V to represent /kʷ/, a practice adopted by the Romans. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K, and Q were all used to represent /k/ and /ɡ/. Q was used before rounded vowels, K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, C (and its variant G) replaced most uses of K and Q; Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.
Use in English
In English, the digraph ⟨qu⟩ most often denotes the cluster /kw/. However, in borrowings from French, it represents /k/, as in plaque. Q is the second least frequently used letter in the English language (after Z), with a frequency of just 0.1% in words. Q has the fourth fewest English words where it is the first letter, after X, Z, and Y. It is nearly always followed by a silent letter U.
Use in Other Languages
In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as Romance and Germanic languages, ⟨q⟩ appears almost exclusively in the digraph ⟨qu⟩. The letter has a wide variety of pronunciations across languages:
- Albanian: /c/
- Azeri: /ɡ/
- Standard Chinese (Pinyin): /t͡ɕʰ/
- Fijian: /ᵑɡ/
- French, Spanish, Portuguese: /k/ (via ⟨qu⟩)
- German: /kv/ (via ⟨qu⟩)
- Italian: /kw/ (via ⟨qu⟩)
- Kurdish, Uzbek, Crimean: /q/
- Maltese, Võro, Sasak: /ʔ/ (glottal stop)
- Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Hadza: /!/ (click consonant)
- Vietnamese: /kw/ (via ⟨qu⟩)
The letter is not officially part of the alphabets of Cornish, Estonian, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Turkish, or Welsh, though it may appear in borrowings.
Typographic Variants
The uppercase Q exhibits significant typographic variation. Its tail may bisect the bowl (as in Helvetica), meet the bowl (as in Univers), or lie completely outside the bowl (as in PT Sans). Old-style serif fonts such as Garamond sometimes contain two uppercase Qs: one with a short tail for short words and another with a long tail for longer words. The lowercase "q" is typically an "o" or "c" with a descender extending from the right side of the bowl.
Other Uses
- The capital letter Q is used as the currency symbol for the Guatemalan quetzal.
- The Roman numeral Q is sometimes used to represent the number 500,000.
- In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨q⟩ represents the voiceless uvular stop.
- In NATO phonetic alphabet, Q is "Quebec"; its Morse code is ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄.
Computing
In Unicode, Q is represented as U+0051 (uppercase) and U+0071 (lowercase).
