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Q (named cue "Q" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "que," op. cit.) is the 17th letter of the English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In nearly all languages using the Latin script it is a consonant, not a vowel.
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The Semitic sound value of Qoph was (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.Travers Wood, Henry Craven Ord Lanchester, A Hebrew Grammar, 1913, p. 7. A. B. Davidson, Hebrew Primer and Grammar, 2000, p. 4. The meaning is doubtful. "Eye of a needle" has been suggested, and also "knot" Harvard Studies in Classical Philology vol. 45.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'. is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. Some have even suggested that the form of the letter Q is even more ancient: it could have originated from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In Greek language, qoppa (Ϙ) probably came to represent several labialized velar stop consonant, among them and . As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to and respectively. Therefore, qoppa was transformed into two letters: qoppa, which Greek numerals the number 90, and phi (Φ), which stood for the aspirated sound that came to be pronounced in Modern Greek.
The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent , and this usage was copied by the Romans with the rest of their alphabet. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds and , which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used before a rounded vowel (e.g. 'ego'), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.
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Old-style serif fonts, such as Garamond, contained two capital Qs: one with a short tail to be used in short words, and another with a long tail to be used in long words. Some early Font included up to 3 different Qs: a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u ligature. 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. Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer D. B. Updike 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". 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. The long-tailed Q had fallen completely 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 not.
Owing to the allowable variation in the Q, the letter is a very distinctive feature of a typeface; like the ampersand, the Q is cited as a letter that gives typographers a chance to express themselves.
Identifont, an automated typeface identification service that identifies typefaces by questions about their appearance, asks about the Q tail second if the "sans-serif" option is chosen. Out of Identifont's database, Q tails are divided thus: 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.
| Bisecting | 1461 | 2719 |
| Meets bowl | 3363 | 4521 |
| Outside bowl | 271 | 397 |
| \mathcal{Q}) shape/" itemprop="url" title="Wiki: Cursive">Cursive | 304 | 428 |
| Inside bowl | 129 | 220 |
Some typographers 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. Frutiger considered such Qs to make for more "harmonious" and "gentle" typefaces. Some typographers, such as Sophie Elinor Brown, have listed "Q" as being among their favorite letters.
It is not considered to be part of the Bosnian, Cornish language (Standard Written Form), Croatian, Estonian, Icelandic, Irish alphabet, Latvian alphabet, Lithuanian, Polish alphabet, Scottish Gaelic, Slovene alphabet, Turkish alphabet, or Welsh alphabet alphabets.
has a wide variety of other pronunciations in some European languages and in non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet.
| + Phonetic values of Q ! IPA !! style="min-width:300px" | Name !! Occurrence |
| IPA, Aymara language, Crimean Tatar, Greenlandic, Hopi language, Kurdish (Latin Kurmanji, Yekgirtú), Kazakh Latin, Luiseño language, Lushootseed, Quechua, Uyghur language, Uzbek language, Zazaki alphabet of the Zaza language and in the interlinguistic Standard Alphabet by Lepsius; phonemic /q/ sometimes as : Somali language, Ket Latin (normally with affrication qχ) | |
| Wolof language | |
| Ket Latin (allophone of q) | |
| K'iche', Nuxalk language | |
| Somali language (allophone of ), Ket Latin (allophone of after ) | |
| several European languages, often only in digraph , which often is pronounced . In some case the whole digraph is pronounced . | |
| Mohegan-Pequot | |
| Neo | |
| Azerbaijani alphabet | |
| Albanian | |
| Maltese language, Menominee, Võro | |
| Fijian language | |
| Chinese language Hanyu Pinyin | |
| transliteration of Classical Mongolian, Mi'kmaq | |
| Raguileo Alfabet for the Mapuche language | |
| Loglan | |
| Hadza language, Xhosa language and Zulu language | |
| Sesotho language | |
| Kiowa language | |
| ISO 9 transliteration of the Cyrillic Abkhaz alphabet for the Abkhaz language | |
| Southern Vietnamese dialects digraph qu is /w/ |
The Roman numeral Q is sometimes used to represent the number 500,000.
The capital letter Q is used to designate a fictional character in the James Bond films and film novelizations, and another in the Star Trek franchise.
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