Q

Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pronounced Template:IPAc-en, most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue, and que.<ref>"Q", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989).
Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993) lists "cue" and "kue" as current. James Joyce used "kew"; it and "que" remain in use.</ref>

History

Egyptian hieroglyph wḏ	Phoenician Qoph	Western Greek Koppa	Etruscan Q	Latin Q
<hiero>V24</hiero>	File:PhoenicianQ-01.svg	File:Greek Koppa normal.svg	File:EtruscanQ-01.svg	Latin Q

The Semitic sound value of Qôp was Template:IPA (voiceless uvular stop), and the form of the letter could have been based on the eye of a needle, a knot, or even a monkey with its tail hanging down.<ref>Travers Wood, Henry Craven Ord Lanchester, A Hebrew Grammar, 1913, p. 7. A. B. Davidson, Hebrew Primer and Grammar, 2000, p. 4 Template:Webarchive. The meaning is doubtful. "Eye of a needle" has been suggested, and also "knot" Harvard Studies in Classical Philology vol. 45.</ref><ref>Isaac Taylor, History of the Alphabet: Semitic Alphabets, Part 1, 2003: "The old explanation, which has again been revived by Halévy, is that it denotes an 'ape,' the character Q being taken to represent an ape with its tail hanging down. It may also be referred to a Talmudic root which would signify an 'aperture' of some kind, as the 'eye of a needle,' ... Lenormant adopts the more usual explanation that the word means a 'knot'.</ref><ref name=":4"/> Template:IPA is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages.Template:Efn In common with other glyphs derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script, the letter has been suggested to have its roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In an early form of Ancient Greek, qoppa (Ϙ) probably came to represent several labialized velar stops, among them Template:IPA and Template:IPA.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to Template:IPA and Template:IPA respectively.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Therefore, qoppa was transformed into two letters: qoppa, which stood for the number 90,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and phi (Φ), which stood for the aspirated sound Template:IPA that came to be pronounced Template:IPA in Modern Greek.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent Template:IPA, and this usage was copied by the Romans with the rest of their alphabet.<ref name=":4" /> In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds Template:IPA and Template:IPA, which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used before a rounded vowel (e.g. Template:Angbr 'ego'), K before Template:IPA (e.g. Template:Angbr 'calendis'), and C elsewhere.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent Template:IPA when immediately followed by a Template:IPA sound.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

In Turkey between 1928 and 2013 the use of the letter Q, alongside X and W, was banned from official government documents, such as street signs and brochures. The letter forms part of the Kurdish alphabet but is not present in Turkish.<ref name=":5">Template:Cite web</ref>

Typographic variants

File:Q typographic styles.svg

The five most common typographic presentations of the capital letter Q

File:Champfleury letter Q illustration Geoffroy Tory (1529).png

A long-tailed Q as drawn by French typographer Geoffroy Tory in his 1529 book, Champfleury

File:Base columna trajana.jpg

The printed long-tailed Q was inspired by ancient Roman square capitals: this long-tailed Q, used here in the Latin word "POPVLVSQVE", was carved into Trajan's column Template:Circa AD 113.

File:Short tailed Q vs long tailed Q text example.svg

A short trilingual text showing the proper use of the long- and short-tailed Q. The short-tailed Q is only used when the word is shorter than the tail; the long-tailed Q is even used in all-capitals text.<ref name=":3" />Template:Rp

Uppercase "Q"

Depending on the typeface used to typeset the letter Q, the letter's tail may either bisect its bowl as in Helvetica,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> meet the bowl as in Univers, or lie completely outside the bowl as in PT Sans. In writing block letters, bisecting tails are the fastest to write, as they require less precision. All three styles are considered equally valid, with most serif typefaces having a Q with a tail that meets the circle, while sans-serif typefaces are more equally split between those with bisecting tails and those without.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref> Typefaces with a disconnected Q tail, while uncommon, have existed since at least 1529.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite book</ref> A common method among type designers to create the shape of the Q is by simply adding a tail to the letter O.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=":1">Template:Cite book</ref>

Old-style serif fonts, such as Garamond, may contain two uppercase Qs: one with a short tail to be used in short words, and another with a long tail to be used in long words.<ref name=":2" /> Some early metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs: a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u ligature.<ref name=":3">Template:Cite book</ref> This print tradition was alive and well until the 19th century, when long-tailed Qs fell out of favor; even recreations of classic typefaces such as Caslon began being distributed with only short Q tails.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=":3" /> American typographer D. B. Updike, who was known to disapprove of the long-tailed Q, celebrated their demise in his 1922 book Printing Types, claiming that Renaissance printers made their Q tails longer and longer simply to "outdo each other".<ref name=":3" /> Latin-language words, which are much more likely than English words to contain "Q" as their first letter, have also been cited as the reason for their existence.<ref name=":3" /> The long-tailed Q had fallen out of use with the advent of early digital typography, as many early digital fonts could not choose different glyphs based on the word that the glyph was in, but it has seen something of a comeback with the advent of OpenType fonts and LaTeX, both of which can automatically typeset the long-tailed Q when it is called for and the short-tailed Q when it is not.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Owing to the allowable variation between letters, Q,<ref name=":0" /><ref>Template:Cite bookTemplate:Dead link</ref> like [[Ampersand|Template:Char]], is often cited as a letter that gives type designers a greater opportunity for self-expression.<ref name=":4">Template:Cite web</ref> Identifont is an automatic typeface identification service that identifies typefaces by asking questions about their appearance and later asks about the Q tail if the "sans-serif" option is chosen.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In the Identifont database, the distribution of Q tails is:<ref>Template:Cite web To get the numbers in the table, click Question 1 (serif or sans-serif?) or Question 2 (Q shape) and change the value. They appear under X possible fonts.</ref>

Q tail type	Serif	Sans-serif
Bisecting	1461	2719
Meets bowl	3363	4521
Outside bowl	271	397
"2" shape (<math>\mathcal{Q}</math>)	304	428
Inside bowl	129	220
Total	5528	8285

Some type designers prefer one "Q" design over another: Adrian Frutiger, famous for the airport typeface that bears his name, remarked that most of his typefaces feature a Q tail that meets the bowl and then extends horizontally.<ref name=":1" /> Frutiger considered such Qs to make for more "harmonious" and "gentle" typefaces.<ref name=":1" /> "Q" often makes the list of their favorite letters; for example, Sophie Elinor Brown, designer of Strato,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> has listed "Q" as being her favorite letter.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Lowercase "q"

File:Q and g comparison.svg

A comparison of the glyphs of Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr

The lowercase "q" is usually seen as a lowercase "o" or "c" with a descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish), or even a reversed lowercase p. The "q"'s descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the "g" (a loop) and "q" (vertical). When handwritten, or as part of a handwriting font, the descender of the "q" sometimes finishes with a rightward swash to distinguish it from the letter "g" (or, particularly in mathematics, from the digit "9").

Use in writing systems

English

In English, the digraph Template:Angbr most often denotes the cluster Template:IPAc-en; however, in borrowings from French, it represents Template:IPAc-en, as in 'plaque'. See the list of English words containing Q not followed by U. 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.

Other languages

In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as Romance and Germanic languages, Template:Angbr appears almost exclusively in the digraph Template:Angbr. In French, Occitan, Catalan, and Portuguese, Template:Angbr represents Template:IPA or Template:IPA; in Spanish, it represents Template:IPA. Template:Angbr replaces Template:Angbr for Template:IPA before front vowels Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, since in those languages Template:Angbr represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels. In Italian, Template:Angbr represents Template:IPA (where Template:IPA is the semivowel allophone of Template:IPA). In Albanian, Q represents Template:IPA, as in Shqip.

The letter is often not used often or at all in other languages, The letter is not officially part of the Cornish (Standard Written Form), Estonian, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Turkish, or Welsh alphabets. However, in some of them, it may be found in borrowings.

Template:Angbr has a wide variety of other pronunciations in some European languages and in non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses Template:Angbr IPA for the voiceless uvular stop.

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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

• Q with diacritics: ʠ Ɋ ɋ q̃
• Japanese linguistics: Small capital q (ꞯ)<ref>Template:Citation</ref> and modifier letter capital q (ꟴ)<ref name="L220251">Template:Cite web</ref>
• 𐞥 Modifier letter small q is used as a superscript IPA letter<ref name="L220252">Template:Cite web</ref>
• Gha: Ƣ ƣ

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤒: Semitic letter Qoph, from which the following symbols originally derive:
  • Ϙ ϙ: Greek letter Koppa
    • 𐌒: Old Italic Q, which is the ancestor of modern Latin Q
    • Ԛ ԛ: Cyrillic letter Qa

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

• ℺: rotated capital Q, a signature mark
• Ꝗ ꝗ, Ꝙ ꝙ: Various forms of Q were used for medieval scribal abbreviations<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

See also

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External links

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