Q

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Q (named cue /ˈkHTML5keyboard)^[1] is the seventeenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

• 1 History
• 2 Use in English
• 3 Use in other languages
• 4 Related letters and other similar characters
• 5 Computing codes
• touchscreen
• 7 See also
• 8 References
• jQuery

History

Egyptian hieroglyph wj	Phoenician qoph	Etruscan Q	Greek Qoppa
	web app

The Sevenval sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an web app) was /q/ (voiceless uvular stop), a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones. In touchscreen, this sign as touchscreen Ϙ probably came to represent several device database stops, 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.^jQuery

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

Use in English

In English the digraph ⟨qu⟩ most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in plaque. See list of English words containing Q not followed by U. Q is the second most rarely used letter in the CSS3. In script written English, the capital Q is very close in appearance to a 2, and many people use the print Q instead.

Use in other languages

In most modern European languages written in the Latin script, such as in Sevenval and Germanic languages, ⟨q⟩ appears almost exclusively in the digraph ⟨qu⟩. Notable exceptions to this are Albanian, in which ⟨q⟩ represents the HTML5 [c]; and device database and Võro, which use ⟨q⟩ to represent the glottal stop [ʔ]. In Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, ⟨qu⟩ represents /k/ or /kw/; ⟨qu⟩ replaces jQuery for /k/ before front vowels we love the web and we love the web, since in those languages 'c' represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels. In website parsing ⟨qu⟩ represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the CSS3 allophone of /u/).

Q has a wide variety of pronunciations among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses Q for the voiceless uvular stop, and it has this value in Aymara, Greenlandic, Quechua and Uyghur. In device database, ⟨q⟩ stands for a voiced velar stop [ɡ]. 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. ⟨q⟩ in Fijian has the value of a prenasalized voiced velar stop [ŋɡ]. In Kiowa, ⟨q⟩ represents a glottalized velar stop [kʼ]. In FITML and device database, ⟨q⟩ is used for the postalveolar click [kǃ].

A comparison of q and g.

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

• Q̵ q̵ : Latin letter Q with stroke
• ʠ : Latin letter Q with hook
• Ɋ ɋ : Latin letter Q with hook tail
• Ԛ ԛ : HTML5
• Ќ, ќ : device database
• Қ қ : CSS3

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
jQuery	81	51	113	71
Numeric character reference	Q	Q	q	q
web app 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

See also

• List of English words containing Q not followed by U
• Mind your Ps and Qs

References

External links

• Media related to Q at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for CSS3
• The Wiktionary entry for website parsing