Q | |
---|---|
Q q | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic and logographic |
Language of origin | Greek language Latin language |
Sound values | (Table) /ˈkjuː/ |
In Unicode | U+0051, U+0071 |
Alphabetical position | 17 |
History | |
Development | |
Time period | Unknown to present |
Descendants | • Ƣ • Ɋ • ℺ • Ԛ |
Sisters | Φ Ф ק ق ܩ ࠒ 𐎖 ቀ Փ փ Ֆ ֆ |
Other | |
Associated graphs | q(x) |
Writing direction | Left-to-right |
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, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pronounced /ˈkjuː/ , most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue, and que. [1]
Egyptian hieroglyph wḏ | Phoenician Qoph | Western Greek Koppa | Etruscan Q | Latin Q | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The Semitic sound value of Qôp was /q/ (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. [2] [3] [4] /q/ is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. [a] In common with other glyphs derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script, the letter has been suggested to have its roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs. [5] [6]
In an early form of Ancient Greek, qoppa (Ϙ) probably came to represent several labialized velar stops, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. [7] As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ respectively. [8] Therefore, qoppa was transformed into two letters: qoppa, which stood for the number 90, [9] and phi (Φ), which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek. [10] [11]
The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/, and this usage was copied by the Romans with the rest of their alphabet. [4] In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds /k/ and /ɡ/, which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used before a rounded vowel (e.g. ⟨EQO⟩ 'ego'), K before /a/ (e.g. ⟨KALENDIS⟩ 'calendis'), and C elsewhere. [12] 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. [13]
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. [14]
Depending on the typeface used to typeset the letter Q, the letter's tail may either bisect its bowl as in Helvetica, [16] meet the bowl as in Univers, or lie completely outside the bowl as in PT Sans. In writing block letters, bisecting tails are the fastest to write, as they require less precision. All three styles are considered equally valid, with most serif typefaces having a Q with a tail that meets the circle, while sans-serif typefaces are more equally split between those with bisecting tails and those without. [17] Typefaces with a disconnected Q tail, while uncommon, have existed since at least 1529. [18] A common method among type designers to create the shape of the Q is by simply adding a tail to the letter O. [17] [19] [20]
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. [18] Some early metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs: a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u ligature. [15] 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. [21] [15] American typographer 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". [15] 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. [15] 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. [22] [23]
Owing to the allowable variation between letters, Q, [17] [24] like &, is often cited as a letter that gives type designers a greater opportunity for self-expression. [4] 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. [25] In the Identifont database, the distribution of Q tails is: [26]
Q tail type | Serif | Sans-serif |
---|---|---|
Bisecting | 1461 | 2719 |
Meets bowl | 3363 | 4521 |
Outside bowl | 271 | 397 |
"2" shape () | 304 | 428 |
Inside bowl | 129 | 220 |
Total | 5528 | 8285 |
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. [20] Frutiger considered such Qs to make for more "harmonious" and "gentle" typefaces. [20] "Q" often makes the list of their favorite letters; for example, Sophie Elinor Brown, designer of Strato, [27] has listed "Q" as being her favorite letter. [28] [29]
The lowercase "q" is usually seen as a lowercase "o" or "c" with a descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish), or even a reversed lowercase p. The "q"'s descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the "g" (a loop) and "q" (vertical). When handwritten, or as part of a handwriting font, the descender of the "q" sometimes finishes with a rightward swash to distinguish it from the letter "g" (or, particularly in mathematics, from the digit "9").
Orthography | Phonemes |
---|---|
Afar | /ʕ/ |
Albanian | /cç/ |
Azeri | /ɡ/ |
Standard Chinese (Pinyin) | /t͡ɕʰ/ |
Dogrib [ clarification needed ] | /ɣ/ |
English | / k w / |
Fijian | /ᵑɡ/ |
French | / k / |
Galician | / k w / |
German | / k w / |
Hadza | /!/ |
Indonesian | / k w / |
Italian | / k w / |
Ket (UNA) | /q/~/qχ/, /ɢ/ |
K'iche | /qʰ/ |
Kiowa | /kʼ/ |
Kurdish | /q/ |
Maltese | /ʔ/ |
Menominee | /ʔ/ |
Mi'kmaq | /x/ |
Mohegan-Pequot | /kʷ/ |
Nuxalk | /qʰ/ |
Portuguese | /k/ |
Sasak | /ʔ/ |
Somali | /q/~/ɢ/ |
Sotho | /!kʼ/ |
Spanish | / k / |
Swedish | / k w / |
Uzbek | /q/ |
Vietnamese | / k w / |
Võro | /ʔ/ |
Wolof | /qː/ |
Xhosa | /!/ |
Zulu | /!/ |
In English, the digraph ⟨qu⟩ most often denotes the cluster /kw/ ; however, in borrowings from French, it represents /k/ , as in 'plaque'. See the list of English words containing Q not followed by U. Q is the second least frequently used letter in the English language (after Z), with a frequency of just 0.1% in words. Q has the fourth fewest English words where it is the first letter, after X, Z, and Y.
In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as Romance and Germanic languages, ⟨q⟩ appears almost exclusively in the digraph ⟨qu⟩. In French, Occitan, Catalan, and Portuguese, ⟨qu⟩ represents /k/ or /kw/; in Spanish, it represents /k/. ⟨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/). In Albanian, Q represents /c/, as in Shqip.
It is not considered to be part of the Cornish (Standard Written Form), Estonian, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Turkish, or Welsh alphabets.
⟨q⟩ has a wide variety of other pronunciations in some European languages and in non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨q⟩ for the voiceless uvular stop.
Preview | Q | q | Q | q | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q | LATIN SMALL LETTER Q | FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q | FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER Q | ||||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 81 | U+0051 | 113 | U+0071 | 65329 | U+FF31 | 65361 | U+FF51 |
UTF-8 | 81 | 51 | 113 | 71 | 239 188 177 | EF BC B1 | 239 189 145 | EF BD 91 |
Numeric character reference | Q | Q | q | q | Q | Q | q | q |
EBCDIC family | 216 | D8 | 152 | 98 | ||||
ASCII [b] | 81 | 51 | 113 | 71 |
G, or g, is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is gee, plural gees.
Palatino is an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Palatino is optimised for legitibility with open counters, balanced proportions, moderate stroke contrast and flared serifs.
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque, § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist, and § Other or mixed.
In typography, a serif is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface, and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic" and serif typefaces as "roman".
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious example in English is the distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. Allographs can vary greatly, without affecting the underlying identity of the grapheme. Even if the word "cat" is rendered as "cAt", it remains recognizable as the sequence of the three graphemes ⟨c⟩, ⟨a⟩, ⟨t⟩.
In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar but may have differing meaning. The designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties.
Lettering is an act or result of artfully drawing letters, instead of writing them simply. Lettering is considered an art form, where each letter in a phrase or quote acts as an illustration. Each letter is created with attention to detail and has a unique role within a composition. Lettering is created as an image, with letters that are meant to be used in a unique configuration. Lettering words do not always translate into alphabets that can later be used in a typeface, since they are created with a specific word in mind.
Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft Corporation in 1996, and it is also used as the font for the logo of Half-Life. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Windows XP default theme, succeeding MS Sans Serif and Tahoma. Released free of charge by Microsoft as part of their core fonts for the Web package, it remained one of the most popular body text fonts on webpages as of 2009.
In typography, a counter is the area of a letter that is entirely or partially enclosed by a letter form or a symbol. The stroke that creates such a space is known as a "bowl". Latin letters containing closed counters include A, B, D, O, P, Q, R, a, b, d, e, g, o, p, and q. Latin letters containing open counters include c, f, h, s etc. The digits 0, 4, 6, 8, and 9 also have counters. An aperture is the opening between an open counter and the outside of the letter.
Gaelic type is a family of Insular script typefaces devised for printing Early Modern Irish. It was widely used from the 16th century until the mid-18th century in Scotland and the mid-20th century in Ireland, but is now rarely used. Sometimes, all Gaelic typefaces are called Celtic or uncial although most Gaelic types are not uncials. The "Anglo-Saxon" types of the 17th century are included in this category because both the Anglo-Saxon types and the Gaelic/Irish types derive from the insular manuscript hand.
Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin. "Akzidenz" indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tickets and forms, as opposed to fine printing, and "grotesque" was a standard name for sans-serif typefaces at the time.
The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants.
The Bauhaus typeface design is based on Herbert Bayer's 1925 experimental Universal typeface and the Bauhaus aesthetic overall.
Typeface anatomy describes the graphic elements that make up letters in a typeface.
Typefaces are born from the struggle between rules and results. Squeezing a square about 1% helps it look more like a square; to appear the same height as a square, a circle must be measurably taller. The two strokes in an X aren't the same thickness, nor are their parallel edges actually parallel; the vertical stems of a lowercase alphabet are thinner than those of its capitals; the ascender on a d isn't the same length as the descender on a p, and so on. For the rational mind, type design can be a maddening game of drawing things differently in order to make them appear the same.
Athelas is a serif typeface designed by Veronika Burian and Jose Scaglione and intended for use in body text. Released by their company TypeTogether in 2008, Burian and Scaglione described Athelas as inspired by British fine book printing.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)...the bisecting tail of the Helvetica 'Q'.
The bowl of the Q is typically similar to the bowl of the O, although not always identical. The style and design of the Q's tail is often a distinctive feature of a typeface.
The uppercase roman Q...has a very long tail, but this has been modified and reduced on versions produced in the following centuries.
Letters that contain truly individual parts [are] S, ... Q...[ permanent dead link ]
roman numerals.