Q

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

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

	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 (pronounced /kjuː/).^[1]

1 History
2 Usage
3 Codes for computing
4 Trivia
5 Abbreviations
6 See also

[edit] 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/.

[edit] 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 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 Albanian, q represents the voiceless palatal plosive, /c/. 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].

In romanised Arabic Q represents voiceless uvular plosive sound [q] as in IPA. The sound is rendered with letter ﻕ in Arabic script.

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 Q represents a voiceless velar plosive, contrary to the belief that it represents a labialized voiceless velar plosive. If this was the case, their would be no need for the "U" at the end.

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".

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 English 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 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).

[edit] Abbreviations

'Q' = Stock symbol for Qwest Communications International Inc.
'Q' = Qualified Developmental Disabilities Professional (aka QP or QDDP).
'Q' = Medical Term for Cardiac Output (Stroke Volume * Heart Rate)

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

List of English words containing Q not followed by U

The ISO basic Latin alphabet

Letter Q with diacritics

Ɋɋʠ

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