Q with stroke (Ꝗ, ꝗ) is a letter of 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 th ...

, derived from writing the letter Q with the addition of a

bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar * Chocolate bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud * Bar (u ...

through the letter's

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v'' c ...

. The letter was used by

scribes A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing. The profession of the scribe, previously widespread across cultures, lost most of its promin ...

during the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

, where it was employed primarily as an abbreviationa modern parallel of this would be abbreviating the word "and" with an ampersand ( &). The letter was also used to write some modern languages. Between 1928 and 1938, the Lezgin and Dargin alphabets had used Ꝗ, but since 1938, both corresponding languages are written with Cyrillic-based alphabets, using the digraph Кь in place of Ꝗ. When used to write the

Latin language 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 t ...

, ꝗ could be used alone or as part of a word. Alone, it stood for '' quam''; as part of a word, it stood for either ''quan-'' (as in ''ꝗdo'' for '' quando'') or ''qui-'' (as in ''ꝗlꝫ'' for '' quilibet''). In the French language, ꝗ was used as an abbreviation for the word ''que''; in Irish, it abbreviated ''ar''. Closely related is the letter Q with diagonal stroke (Ꝙ, ꝙ), which stood alone to abbreviate ''

quod Quod may refer to: * ''The Quod'', a contemporary nickname for the English Quota System during the Napoleonic Wars * a ''quod'', the main playing item in the fictional sport of Quodpot in the Harry Potter universe * Quod (board game), an abstra ...

'', '' qui'' and '' que'' in Latin. In Portuguese, ꝙ also abbreviated '' quem''.

Computer encoding

Ꝗ and Ꝙ, along with other letters of interest to scholars of medieval manuscripts, was added to the Unicode Standard in 2006 after a request by

Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006. H ...

. It resides in the

Latin Extended-D Latin Extended-D is a Unicode block containing Latin characters for phonetic, Mayanist, and Medieval transcription and notation systems. 89 of the characters in this block are for medieval characters proposed by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiati ...

block of the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecima ...

References

{{Latin script, Q, stroke Phonetic transcription symbols Latin letters with diacritics