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The letter Q is the seventeenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is cue, occasionally spelled cu (both pronounced ).
History The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw cord, and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was (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 probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, 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 stood for a number only, and Phi Φ which stood for the aspirated sound that came to be pronounced in Modern Greek. The Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V to represent . Usage In most modern western languages written in Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, Q appears almost exclusively in the digraph QU, though see: Q without U. In English this digraph most often denotes the cluster , except in borrowings from French where it represents as in plaque. In Italian qu represents (where is an allophone of ); in German, ; and in French, Portuguese language, Occitan, Spanish, and Catalan, . (In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan and French, qu replaces c for before front vowels i and e, since in those contexts c is a fricative and letter 'k' is seldom used outside loan words.) In the Aymara, Azeri, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. is also used in IPA for the voiceless uvular plosive, as well as in most transliteration schemes of Semitic languages for the "emphatic" qōp sound. In Maltese and Võro, Q denotes the glottal stop. In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin and Albanian, Q is used to represent the sound , which is close to English "ch" in "cheese". Q is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it, thus making it the second most rarely used letter in the English Language The lowercase Q is usually written as a lowercase O with a line below it, with or without a "tail". It is usually typed without due to the major difference between the tails of the lowercase G and lowercase Q. It is usually written with the tail to distinguish from the G. Unlike the written lowercase G, which has a leftward facing tail, the Q's tail faces right. Codes for computing In Unicode the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lowercase q is U+0071. The ASCII code for capital Q is 81 and for lowercase q is 113; or in binary 01010001 and 01110001, correspondingly. The EBCDIC code for capital Q is 216 and for lowercase q is 152. The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "& Meanings for Q In entertainment Trivia sn:Q yo:Q | ||||||||
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