Uppercase "Q"

Depending on the typeface used to typeset the letter Q, the letter's tail may either bisect its bowl as in Helvetica,^[15] meet the bowl as in Univers, or lie completely outside the bowl as in PT Sans. In writing block letters, bisecting tails are 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.^[16] Typefaces with a disconnected Q tail, while uncommon, have existed since at least 1529.^[17] A common method among type designers to create the shape of the Q is by simply adding a tail to the letter O.^[16][18][19]

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.^[17] 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.^[14] 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.^[20][14] Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer D. B. Updike 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".^[14] 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.^[14] 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.^[21][22]

Owing to the allowable variation between letters Q, Q is a very distinctive feature of a typeface;^[16][23] as &, Q is oft cited as a letter that gives type designers a greater opportunity at self-expression.^[4]

Identifont, an automatic typeface identification service that identifies typefaces by questions about their appearance, asks about the Q tail second if the "sans-serif" option is chosen.^[24] In the Identifont database, the distribution of Q tails is:^[25]

Q tail type	Serif	Sans-serif
Bisecting	1461	2719
Meets bowl	3363	4521
Outside bowl	271	397
"2" shape (${\displaystyle {\mathcal {Q}}}$)	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.^[19] Frutiger considered such Qs to make for more "harmonious" and "gentle" typefaces.^[19] "Q" often makes the list of their favorite letters; for example, Sophie Elinor Brown, designer of Strato,^[26] has listed "Q" as being her favorite letter.^[27][28]

Lowercase "q"

A comparison of the glyphs of ⟨q⟩ and ⟨g⟩

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, the digit "9").

Phonetic and phonemic transcription

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨q⟩ for the voiceless uvular stop.

English standard orthography

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.

Other orthographies

In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as in 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.

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

• Q with diacritics: ʠ Ɋ ɋ q̃
• Japanese linguistics: Small capital q (ꞯ)^[31] and modifier letter capital q (ꟴ)^[32]
• 𐞥 Modifier letter small q is used as a superscript IPA letter^[33]
• Gha: Ƣ ƣ

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤒 : Semitic letter Qoph, from which the following symbols originally derive
  • Ϙ ϙ: Greek letter Koppa
    • 𐌒 : Old Italic Q, which is the ancestor of modern Latin Q
    • Ԛ ԛ : Cyrillic letter Qa

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

• ℺ : rotated capital Q, a signature mark
• Ꝗ ꝗ, Ꝙ ꝙ : Various forms of Q were used for medieval scribal abbreviations^[34]

Notes