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The letter K is the eleventh letter in the Latin alphabet. It comes from the Greek Κ or κ (Kappa) developed from the Semitic Kap, 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 for the Egyptian word for hand, d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound. This Semitic value of for this letter was maintained in most classic as well as modern languages, although Latin abandoned the use of K almost completely, preferring C. When Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was converted to C. Some words from other alphabets were also transliterated into C. Therefore, 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 that uses hard C in addition to K. Some English linguists prefer to reverse the Latin transliteration process for proper names in Greek, spelling Ceres as "Keres", for example. And the writing down of languages that don't have their own alphabet with the Latin one has resulted in a standardization of the letter K for this sound, as in Kwakiutl. Its name in English is kay . In English, it is generally pronounced with the sound, but is silent when followed by an n, in words like knowledge. Sometimes, in advertising it is used instead of C. In the International phonetic alphabet, k is the symbol for the voiceless velar plosive. Several other alphabets also use characters with sharp angles to indicate the sound or syllables that start with a , for example:Japanese く, Arabic ﮐ, Hebrew כ (in some fonts), Korean ㄱ. This kind of phonetic-visual association was studied by Wolfgang Köhler. However, there are also many examples of rounded letters for , like ค in Thai or Գ in Armenian.
Codes for computing In Unicode the capital K is codepoint U+004B and the lowercase k is U+006B. The ASCII code for capital K is 75 and for lowercase k is 107; or in binary 01001011 and 01101011, correspondingly. The EBCDIC code for capital K is 210, and for lowercase k, 146. The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "& Meanings for K See also sn:K yo:K | ||||||||
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