Q

Q (; named cue)^[1] is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents History Famous Quoters Usage Computing codes See also References

---

History

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, |title=New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin |first=Andrew L.

|last=Sihler |edition=illustrated |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1995 |location=New York |ISBN=0195083458 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=IeHmqKY2BqoC |pages=21 }}

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

Famous Quoters

Some famous people that have written about the letter Q include Wylie, Noah, and their mother Lauren All the authors mentioned have written essay about the letter Q. Wylie and Lauren both wrote essays called, "The Q Snow Day" Noah wrote an essay called, "My Snow Day With Q"

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› (e.g. quick, quit, quack), 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. Q is the second most rarely used letter in the English alphabet.
• In Italian ‹qu› represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the semivowel allophone of /u/)
• In Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, ‹qu› represents /k/ or /kw/; ‹qu› replaces ‹c› for /k/ before front vowels ‹i› and ‹e›, since in

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.

In Fijian, ‹q› represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ].

In Xhosa and Zulu, ‹q› represents the postalveolar click [kǃ].

In Kiowa, ‹q› represents a glottalized velar plosive, /kʼ/.

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). 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.

In physics, Q and q are used to denote electric charge; Q is used for energy (especially in a form of heat).

Computing codes

In Unicode, the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lower case q is U+0071.

The ASCII hexadecimal codes for capital Q and lowercase q are 51 and 71, respectively. These equal 81 and 113 in decimal, and 01010001 and 01110001 in binary.

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.

See also

• List of English words containing Q not followed by U
• Q with stroke
• Q with hook
• Q with hook tail
• Ќ
• Қ
• Mind your Ps and Qs
• Q (Star Trek)
• Q (source) the hypothetical source for the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke

References

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |}

Categories: Pages with incorrectly substituted templates