K

The letter K comes from the Greek letter K (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand. This in turn was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing D in the Egyptian word for hand, d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound. In modern-day English slang, the word "k" is used as a substitute for the abbreviation "O.K.", or "Okay."

When Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was changed to C, with a few exceptions such as the praenomen Kaeso. Some words from other alphabets were also transliterated into C. Hence, the Romance languages have K only in words from still other language groups. The Celtic languages also chose C over K, and this influence carried over into Old English. Today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use hard C in addition to K (though Dutch use it in learned words of Latin origin and follows the same "hard / soft" distinction in such words as does French and English – but not in native words).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [k] is the symbol for the voiceless velar plosive.

In Unicode, the capital K is codepoint U+004B and the lower case k is U+006B.

The EBCDIC code for capital K is 210, and for lowercase k, 146.

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

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