q¹

 

17th letter of the alphabet, corresponding to the koppa of western Greek alphabets. U must follow the letter in English (e.g., queen, question), and the combination properly represents a sound much like the true voiceless labiovelar stop (also represented by the combination kw).

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 is the seventeenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled cue (IPA: /kju/).^[1]

History

Egyptian hieroglyph wj	Phoenician Q	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. 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, Azeri, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] is also used in 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 is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it in English, thus making it 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

In Unicode the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lowercase 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.

Meanings of Q

See Q (disambiguation).

Trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

• Q is the only letter that does not appear in any US state name
• People connected to an IRC-network with usermode +q are immune to bans, kicks and akicks.
• "Q" Added To Stock Ticker Symbol: When a company is involved in bankruptcy proceedings, the letter "Q" is added to the end of the company's stock ticker symbol. When a company emerges from bankruptcy, in most cases the plan of reorganization will cancel the existing equity stock.
• Q is the least used letter in the written English language
• Q is never used as the initial letter in the call sign of any radio or television station, being prohibited from such use by the ITU anywhere in the world (as of 2007).

Abbreviations

• 'Q' = Stock symbol for Qwest Communications International Inc.
• 'Q' = Qualified Developmental Disabilities Professional (aka QP or QDDP).

See also

• List of English words containing Q not followed by U

The ISO 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
Letter Q with diacritics ʠɊɋ Two-letter combinations Qa Qb Qc Qd Qe Qf Qg Qh Qi Qj Qk Ql Qm Qn Qo Qp Qq Qr Qs Qt Qu Qv Qw Qx Qy Qz QA QB QC QD QE QF QG QH QI QJ QK QL QM QN QO QP QQ QR QS QT QU QV QW QX QY QZ Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations                 Q0 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9                 0Q 1Q 2Q 3Q 4Q 5Q 6Q 7Q 8Q 9Q history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters

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