K, or k, is the eleventh
letter
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
in the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
, used in the
modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is
''kay'' (pronounced ), plural ''kays''. The letter K usually represents the
voiceless velar plosive
The voiceless velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is k.
The sound is a ver ...
.
History
The letter K comes from the
Greek letter
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as w ...
Κ (
kappa
Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ; el, κάππα, ''káppa'') is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless velar plosive sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value o ...
), which was taken from the
Semitic kaph
Kaph (also spelled kaf) is the eleventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician kāp , Hebrew kāf , Aramaic kāp , Syriac kāp̄ , and Arabic kāf (in abjadi order).
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek kappa (Κ), Lati ...
, the symbol for an open hand.
["K". ''The Oxford English Dictionary'', 2nd ed., 1977, online](_blank)
/ref> This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semitic tribes
Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a name used since the 1770s to refer to the language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta.
Semitic may also refer to:
Religions
* Abrahamic religions
** ...
who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing /ḏ/ in the Egyptian word for hand, ⟨ ḏ-r-t⟩ (likely pronounced in Old Egyptian
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the deciphe ...
). The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.
K was brought into the Latin alphabet with the name ''ka'' /kaː/ to differentiate it from C, named ''ce'' (pronounced /keː/) and Q, named ''qu'' and pronounced /kuː/. In the earliest Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds and (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used before a rounded vowel (e.g. 'ego'), K before /a/ (e.g. 'calendis'), and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C and its variant G replaced most usages of K and Q. K survived only in a few fossilized forms such as ''Kalendae'', "the calends
The calends or kalends ( la, kalendae) is the first day of every month in the Roman calendar. The English word " calendar" is derived from this word.
Use
The Romans called the first day of every month the ''calends'', signifying the start of a ...
".
After Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was transliterated as a C. Loanwords from other alphabets with the sound were also transliterated with C. Hence, the Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
generally use C, in imitating Classical Latin's practice, and have K only in later loanwords from other language groups. The Celtic languages
The Celtic languages ( usually , but sometimes ) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward ...
also tended to use C instead of K, and this influence carried over into Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
.
Pronunciation and use
English
English is now the only Germanic language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
to productively use "hard" (outside the digraph ) rather than (although Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
uses it in loan words of Latin origin
This is a list of Latin words with loanword, derivatives in English (and other modern languages).
Ancient orthography did not distinguish between ''i'' and ''j'' or between ''u'' and ''v''. Many modern works distinguish u from v but not i from j. ...
, and the pronunciation of these words follows the same hard/soft distinction as in English).
The letter is silent at the start of an English word when it comes before the letter , as in the words "knight," "knife," "knot," "know," and "knee".
Like J, X, Q, and Z, the letter K is not used very frequently in English. It is the fifth least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency in words of about 0.8%.
Number
In the International System of Units (SI), the SI prefix
The International System of Units, known by the international abbreviation SI in all languages and sometimes pleonastically as the SI system, is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. E ...
for one thousand is kilo-, officially abbreviated as k: for example, prefixed to ''metre''/''meter'' or its abbreviation ''m'', ''kilometre'' or ''km'' signifies a thousand metres. As such, people occasionally represent numbers in a non-standard notation by replacing the last three zeros of the general numeral with K, as in 30K for 30,000.
Other languages
In most languages where it is employed, this letter represents the sound (with or without aspiration) or some similar sound.
Other systems
The International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
uses for the voiceless velar plosive
The voiceless velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is k.
The sound is a ver ...
.
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
* 𐤊 : Semitic letter Kaph
Kaph (also spelled kaf) is the eleventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician kāp , Hebrew kāf , Aramaic kāp , Syriac kāp̄ , and Arabic kāf (in abjadi order).
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek kappa (Κ), Lati ...
, from which the following symbols originally derive
* Κ κ/ϰ : Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
letter Kappa
Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ; el, κάππα, ''káppa'') is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless velar plosive sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value o ...
, from which K derives
* К к : Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
letter Ka, also derived from Kappa
* K with diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s: Ƙ ƙ, Ꝁ ꝁ, Ḱ ḱ, Ǩ ǩ, Ḳ ḳ, Ķ ķ, ᶄ
The palatal hook () is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished fro ...
, Ⱪ ⱪ, Ḵ ḵ
** Ꞣ and ꞣ were used in Latvian orthography
Latvian may refer to:
*Something of, from, or related to Latvia
**Latvians, a Baltic ethnic group, native to what is modern-day Latvia and the immediate geographical region
**Latvian language
Latvian ( ), also known as Lettish, is an Easter ...
before 1921
*The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nesto ...
uses various forms of the letter K:
**
**
**
*ₖ : Subscript small k was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902
*Ʞ ʞ : Turned capital and small k were used in transcriptions of the Dakota language
Dakota (''Dakhótiyapi, Dakȟótiyapi''), also referred to as Dakhota, is a Siouan language spoken by the Dakota people of the Sioux tribes. Dakota is closely related to and mutually intelligible with the Lakota language. It is critically endan ...
in publications of the American Board of Ethnology in the late 19th century. Turned small k was also used for a velar click
A velar click, or more precisely a back-released velar click, is a click consonant found in paralinguistic use in languages across Africa, such as Wolof. The tongue is in a similar position to other click articulations, such as an alveolar clic ...
in the International Phonetic Alphabet but its use was withdrawn in 1970.
*𝼐 : Small capital turned k is used as a click letter
Various letters have been used to write the click consonants of southern Africa. The precursors of the current IPA letters, , were created by Karl Richard Lepsius and used by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who added .
Also influential were Daniel ...
*𝼃 : Small letter reversed k is used as a Voice Quality Symbol
Voice Quality Symbols (VoQS) are a set of phonetic symbols used to transcribe disordered speech for what in speech pathology is known as "voice quality". This phrase is usually synonymous with phonation in phonetics, but in speech pathology encom ...
(VoQS)
Ligatures and abbreviations
* ₭ : Lao kip
The kip ( lo, ກີບ, kib; code: LAK; sign: ₭ or ₭N; french: kip; officially: ເງີນກີບລາວ, lit. "currency Lao kip") is the currency of Laos since 1955. Historically, one kip was divided into 100 ''att'' ().
The term d ...
* Ꝃ ꝃ, Ꝅ ꝅ, Ꞣ ꞣ : Various forms of K were used for medieval scribal abbreviation
Scribal abbreviations or sigla (grammatical number, singular: siglum) are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek language, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscrip ...
s
Computing codes
: 1
Other representation
Other usage
* "K" replacing "C" in satiric misspelling
A satiric misspelling is an intentional misspelling of a word, phrase or name for a rhetorical purpose. This can be achieved with intentional malapropism (e.g. replacing ''erection'' for ''election''), enallage (giving a sentence the wrong form, ...
.
* K is the unit symbol for the kelvin
The kelvin, symbol K, is the primary unit of temperature in the International System of Units (SI), used alongside its prefixed forms and the degree Celsius. It is named after the Belfast-born and University of Glasgow-based engineer and phys ...
, used to measure thermodynamic temperature (note: degree sign is not used with kelvin scale).
* K is the chemical symbol
Chemical symbols are the abbreviations used in chemistry for chemical elements, functional groups and chemical compounds. Element symbols for chemical elements normally consist of one or two letters from the Latin alphabet and are written with th ...
for element potassium
Potassium is the chemical element with the symbol K (from Neo-Latin ''kalium'') and atomic number19. Potassium is a silvery-white metal that is soft enough to be cut with a knife with little force. Potassium metal reacts rapidly with atmosphe ...
(from its Latin name ).
* Triangle K
Triangle K is a kosher certification agency under the leadership of Rabbi Aryeh R. Ralbag. It was founded by his late father, Rabbi Yehosef Ralbag. The hechsher is a letter K enclosed in an equilateral triangle.
Supervision and certification
Th ...
.
* Unit prefix A unit prefix is a specifier or mnemonic that is prepended to units of measurement to indicate multiples or fractions of the units. Units of various order of magnitude, sizes are commonly formed by the use of such prefixes. The Metric prefix, prefi ...
k, meaning 1000 times.
* Josef K is the name of the principal character in Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ...
's novel ''The Trial
''The Trial'' (german: Der Process, link=no, previously , and ) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and p ...
''.
* In chess notation, the letter K represents the King (WK for White King, BK for Black King).
* In baseball scoring, the letter K is used to represent a strikeout
In baseball or softball, a strikeout (or strike-out) occurs when a batter accumulates three strikes during a time at bat. It usually means that the batter is out. A strikeout is a statistic recorded for both pitchers and batters, and is deno ...
. A forwards oriented K represents a "strikeout swinging"; a backwards oriented K (
) represents a "strikeout looking".
* As abbreviation for OK, often used in emails and short text messages.
* K is used as a slang term for Ketamine
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used medically for induction and maintenance of anesthesia. It is also used as a recreational drug. It is one of the safest anesthetics, as, in contrast with opiates, ether, and propofol, it suppresses ne ...
among recreational drug users.
* In the CMYK color model
The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation ''CMYK'' refers ...
, K represents black ink.
* In International Morse code
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...
it is used to mean "over
Over may refer to:
Places
*Over, Cambridgeshire, England
*Over, Cheshire, England
*Over, South Gloucestershire, England
* Over, Tewkesbury, near Gloucester, England
** Over Bridge
*Over, Seevetal, Germany
Music
Albums
* ''Over'' (album), by Pe ...
".
* In fracture mechanics, ''K'' is used to represent the stress intensity factor
In fracture mechanics, the stress intensity factor () is used to predict the stress state ("stress intensity") near the tip of a crack or notch caused by a remote load or residual stresses. It is a theoretical construct usually applied to a h ...
.
* In physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
, ''k'' usually stands for Boltzmann's constant
The Boltzmann constant ( or ) is the proportionality factor that relates the average relative kinetic energy of particles in a gas with the thermodynamic temperature of the gas. It occurs in the definitions of the kelvin and the gas constant ...
* K (logic).
* K is used colloquially to mean kilometre
The kilometre ( SI symbol: km; or ), spelt kilometer in American English, is a unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), equal to one thousand metres (kilo- being the SI prefix for ). It is now the measurement unit used for ex ...
(as in "a 10K run").
* K is used to indicate thousands, especially when expressing amounts of money, e.g. $20K = twenty thousand dollars.
* In the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
under the old system (before 2001), a licence plate that begins with "K" for example "K123 XYZ" would correspond to a vehicle registered between August 1, 1992, and July 31, 1993. Again under the old system, a licence plate that ends with "K" for example "ABC 123K" would correspond to a vehicle that was registered between August 1, 1971, and July 31, 1972.
* On Idaho license plates, an initial K in the plate number indicates it was issued in Kootenai County
Kootenai County ( ) is located in the U.S. state of Idaho. In 2020, the United States Census Bureau estimated the county's population at 171,362, making it the third-most populous county in Idaho and by far the largest in North Idaho, the coun ...
.
References
External links
*
*
*
{{Latin alphabet, K}
ISO basic Latin letters