Q

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/

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 Maltese and Võro, ‹q› denotes the glottal stop.

In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, ‹q› is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English ‹ch› in "cheese".

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

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

The EBCDIC code for capital Q is 216 and for lowercase q is 152.

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

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