q

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or Q (kyū) pronunciation
n., pl., q's, or Q's, also qs or Qs.
  1. The 17th letter of the modern English alphabet.
  2. Any of the speech sounds represented by the letter q.
  3. The 17th in a series.
  4. Something shaped like the letter Q.
  5. Q A hypothetical lost manuscript, consisting largely of sayings of Jesus, that is believed to have been the source of those passages in Matthew and Luke that bear close similarity to each other but not to parallel passages in Mark.

[Sense 5, probably from German Q(uelle), source.]


q2
Physics
The symbol for charge (sense ).


Q, 17th letter of the alphabet, corresponding to the koppa of western Greek alphabets. U must follow the letter in English (e.g., queen, question), and the combination properly represents a sound much like the true voiceless labiovelar stop (also represented by the combination kw).


‘muddy home farm’, or ‘home farm with good manure’, OE cwēad + hām-tūn: Quidhampton Hampshire Quedementun (1086) (DB). Quidhampton Wiltshire Quedhampton (1249).

Previous:Quidenham, Quethiock, Querrin
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A Nasdaq stock symbol specifying that a particular stock is in bankruptcy proceedings.

Investopedia Says:
Nasdaq-listed securities have four or five characters. If a fifth letter appears, it identifies the issue as other than a single issue of common stock or capital stock.


as in: the letter Q
sign description: The Q handshape.





symbol for a measure of the activity of an enzyme, especially a respiratory enzyme, defined as the number of microlitres (at stp) of gaseous substrate S used up per hour per milligram enzyme. It could be extended to nongaseous substrates by taking 1 µmol as equivalent to 22.4 µL.

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Random House Word Menu by Stephen Glazier
For a list of words related to q, see:

  See crossword solutions for the clue Q.
Q
ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll
Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt
Uu Vv Ww Xx
Yy Zz

Q (named cue /ˈkjuː/)[1] is the seventeenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Contents

History

Egyptian hieroglyph
wj
Phoenician
qoph
Etruscan Q Greek
Qoppa
V24
PhoenicianQ-01.png EtruscanQ-01.svg GreekQ-01.png

The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was /q/ (voiceless uvular stop), 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 stops, 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.

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel (e.g. "EQO" = 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.[2]

The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/

Use in English

In English the digraph ⟨qu⟩ most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in plaque. See list of English words containing Q not followed by U. Q is the second most rarely used letter in the English alphabet. In script written English, the capital Q is very close in appearance to a 2, and many people use the print Q instead.

Use in other languages

In most modern European languages written in the Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, ⟨q⟩ appears almost exclusively in the digraph ⟨qu⟩. Notable exceptions to this are Albanian, in which ⟨q⟩ represents the voiceless palatal stop [c]; and Maltese and Võro, which use ⟨q⟩ to represent the glottal stop [ʔ]. In Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, ⟨qu⟩ represents /k/ or /kw/; ⟨qu⟩ replaces ⟨c⟩ for /k/ before front vowels ⟨i⟩ and ⟨e⟩, since in those languages 'c' represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels. In Italian ⟨qu⟩ represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the semivowel allophone of /u/).

Q has a wide variety of pronunciations among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses Q for the voiceless uvular stop, and it has this value in Aymara, Greenlandic, Quechua and Uyghur. In Azerbaijani, ⟨q⟩ stands for a voiced velar stop [ɡ]. In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, ⟨q⟩ is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English ⟨ch⟩ in "cheese", but pronounced further toward the front of the mouth. ⟨q⟩ in Fijian has the value of a prenasalized voiced velar stop [ŋɡ]. In Kiowa, ⟨q⟩ represents a glottalized velar stop [kʼ]. In Xhosa and Zulu, ⟨q⟩ is used for the postalveolar click [kǃ].

A comparison of q and g.

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), even a reversed lowercase p. 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.

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

character Q q
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q LATIN SMALL LETTER Q
character encoding decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 81 0051 113 0071
UTF-8 81 51 113 71
Numeric character reference Q Q q q
ASCII 1 81 51 113 71
EBCDIC family 216 D8 152 98

1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

See also

References

  1. ^ "Q" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "que," op. cit.
  2. ^ Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (illustrated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 21. ISBN 0-19-508345-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=IeHmqKY2BqoC. 

External links

  • Media related to Q at Wikimedia Commons
  • The Wiktionary entry for Q
  • The Wiktionary entry for q


Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter Q with diacritics
Ɋɋ Ƣƣ ʠ
Related

Dansk (Danish)
1.
n. - q, det 17. bogstavet i alfabetet

2.
symb. - q (elektrisk ladning)

Nederlands (Dutch)
vraag, (van de) koningin

Français (French)
1.
n. - Q q (dix-septième lettre de l'alphabet)

2.
symb. - (Phys) charge électrique

Deutsch (German)
1.
n. - Q

2.
symb. - Quintal, Frage

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - το δέκατο έβδομο γράμμα του αγγλικού αλφαβήτου
abbr. - βασίλισσα, ερώτηση
symb. - (φυσ.) κουόρκ

Italiano (Italian)
Q, quart, trimestrale, Quebec, Queensland, regina, domanda, quesito

Português (Portuguese)
n. - décima sétima letra do alfabeto inglês (m)
abbr. - quintal métrico, quasi
symb. - coulomb (el.), pressão dinâmica (fís.)

Русский (Russian)
17-фя буква англ. алфавита, королева, вопрос

Español (Spanish)
1.
n. - décimo sexta letra del alfabeto inglés, reina, pregunta

2.
symb. - carga eléctrica

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - q
abbr. - quarts-, kvartsformat, kvarto, liksom, på sätt och vis, halv-, kvasi-, skenbar
symb. - centner, deciton, värme (fys.), drottning (schack.), fråga

中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
电荷

中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
symb. - 電荷

한국어 (Korean)
1.
n. - 영어 알파벳의 17번째 글자 'q'

2.
symb. - 전기 충전

日本語 (Japanese)
abbr. - キュー, Q字形のもの

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الحرف السابع عشر في الأبجديه (اختصار) مختصر : ملكه, سؤال, مقاطعه كويبيك, مقاطعه كوينزلاند (علامه) شي على شكل حرف كيو‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מלכה, שאלה, קוורטו (דף), קוודריליון‬
symb. - ‮יחידה של אנרגיית חום, חום (פיסיקה), יחס התגובה להתנגדות של מסלול האלקטרון‬


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modus tollendo ponens (philosophy)
Q and A (abbreviation)
CoQ