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Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pronounced , most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue, and que."Q", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989).
Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993) lists "cue" and "kue" as current. James Joyce used "kew"; it and "que" remain in use.
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. In common with other glyphs derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script, the letter has been suggested to have its roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In an early form of Ancient Greek, 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 (e.g. 'calendis'), and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent when immediately followed by a sound.
In Turkey between 1928 and 2013 the use of the letter Q, alongside X and W, was banned from official government documents, such as street signs and brochures. The letter forms part of the Kurdish alphabet but is not present in Turkish language.
Old-style serif fonts, such as Garamond, may contain two uppercase 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. American Typography D. B. Updike, who was known to disapprove of the long-tailed Q, 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 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 it is not.
Owing to the allowable variation between letters, Q, like Ampersand, is often cited as a letter that gives type designers a greater opportunity for self-expression. Identifont is an automatic typeface identification service that identifies typefaces by asking questions about their appearance and later asks about the Q tail if the "sans-serif" option is chosen. In the Identifont database, the distribution of Q tails is: 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 |
| Cursive () | 304 | 428 |
| Inside bowl | 129 | 220 |
Some type designers 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. "Q" often makes the list of their favorite letters; for example, Sophie Elinor Brown, designer of Strato, has listed "Q" as being her favorite letter.
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The letter is often not used often or at all in other languages, The letter is not officially part of the Cornish language (Standard Written Form), Estonian, Icelandic, Irish alphabet, Latvian alphabet, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovene alphabet, Turkish alphabet, or Welsh alphabet alphabets. However, in some of them, it may be found in borrowings.
has a wide variety of other pronunciations in some European languages and in non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet.
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