K

K is the eleventh letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is kay (pronounced /ˈkeɪ/), plural kays.[1] The letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive.

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see K (disambiguation).

K
K k
(See below)
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic and Logographic
Language of origin	Latin language
Phonetic usage	[k] [kʰ] [kʼ] [ɡ] /keɪ/
Unicode value	U+004B, U+006B
Alphabetical position	11
History
Development	Κ κ ϰ 𐌊 K k
Time period	~-700 to present
Descendants	• K  • Ʞ  • ₭
Sisters	К כ ך ک ك ܟ ࠊ 𐎋 ከ Կ կ Հ հ Խ խ
Variations	(See below)
Other
Other letters commonly used with	k(x)

History

Egyptian hieroglyph D	Proto-Semitic K	Phoenician K	Etruscan K	Greek Kappa

The letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kaph, the symbol for an open hand.[2] This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semitic tribes who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing /ḏ/ in the Egyptian word for hand, ⟨ḏ-r-t⟩ (likely pronounced /ˈcʼaːɾat/ in Old Egyptian). The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.[3]

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the 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. 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".[4]

After Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was transliterated as a C. Loanwords from other alphabets with the sound /k/ were also transliterated with C. Hence, the Romance languages generally use C, in imitating Classical Latin's practice, and have K only in later loanwords from other language groups. The Celtic languages also tended to use C instead of K, and this influence carried over into Old English.

Pronunciation and use

Pronunciations of Kk

Most common pronunciation: /k/
Language	Dialect(s)	Pronunciation (IPA)	Environment	Notes
Faroese		/k/	hard
		/tʃʰ/	soft
Greek		/c/	soft	Latinization
		/k/	hard	Latinization
Icelandic		/cʰ/	soft
		/ç/	soft, lenited
		/kʰ/	hard
		/x/	hard, lenited
Mandarin	Standard	/kʰ/		Pinyin latinization
Norwegian		/ç/	soft
		/k/	hard
Swedish		/k/	hard
		/ɕ/	soft
Turkish		/c/	soft
		/k/	hard

English

Today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use "hard" ⟨c⟩ (outside the digraph ⟨ck⟩) rather than ⟨k⟩ (although Dutch uses it in loan words of Latin origin, and the pronunciation of these words follows the same hard/soft distinction as in English).

The letter ⟨k⟩ is silent at the start of an English word when it comes before the letter ⟨n⟩, 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 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 /k/ (with or without aspiration) or some similar sound.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨k⟩ for the voiceless velar plosive.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

• 𐤊 : Semitic letter Kaph, from which the following symbols originally derive
• Κ κ/ϰ : Greek letter Kappa, from which K derives
• К к : Cyrillic letter Ka, also derived from Kappa
• K with diacritics: Ƙ ƙ Ꝁ ꝁ Ḱ ḱ Ǩ ǩ Ḳ ḳ Ķ ķ ᶄ Ⱪ ⱪ Ḵ ḵ
  • Ꞣ and ꞣ were used in Latvian orthography before 1921[5]
• The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses various forms of the letter K:[6]
  • U+1D0B ᴋ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL K
  • U+1D37 ᴷ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL K
  • U+1D4F ᵏ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL K
• ₖ : Subscript small k was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902[7]
• Ʞ ʞ : Turned capital and small k were used in transcriptions of the Dakota language in publications of the American Board of Ethnology in the late 19th century.[8] Turned small k was also used for a velar click in the International Phonetic Alphabet but its use was withdrawn in 1970.

Ligatures and abbreviations

• ₭ : Lao kip
• Ꝃ ꝃ, Ꝅ ꝅ, Ꞣ ꞣ : Various forms of K were used for medieval scribal abbreviations[9]

Computing codes

Character information

Preview	K		k		K
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K		LATIN SMALL LETTER K		KELVIN SIGN
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	75	U+004B	107	U+006B	8490	U+212A
UTF-8	75	4B	107	6B	226 132 170	E2 84 AA
Numeric character reference	K	K	k	k	K	K
EBCDIC family	210	D2	146	92
ASCII ^1	75	4B	107	6B

¹ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and nMacintosh families of encodings.

Other representation

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Kilo	▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	Braille dots-13 Unified English Braille

Other usage

• "K" replacing "C" in satiric misspelling.
• K is the unit symbol for the kelvin, used to measure thermodynamic temperature.
• K is the chemical symbol for the element potassium (K is an abbreviation of kalium, the Latin name for potassium).
• Triangle K.
• Unit prefix k, meaning 1000 times.
• Josef K is the name of the principal character in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial.
• 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. 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 among recreational drug users.
• In the CMYK color model, K represents black ink.
• In International Morse code it is used to mean "over".[10]
• In fracture mechanics, K is used to represent the stress intensity factor.
• In physics, k usually stands for Boltzmann's constant
• K (logic).
• K is used colloquially to mean kilometre (as in "a 10K run").
• When expressing amounts of money, $20K means twenty thousand dollars.
• In the United Kingdom 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.

References

1. "K" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "kay," op. cit.
2. "K". The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1977, online(registration required)
3. Gordon, Cyrus H. (1970). "The Accidental Invention of the Phonemic Alphabet". Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 29 (3): 193. doi:10.1086/372069. JSTOR 543451.
4. Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (illustrated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. p. 21. ISBN 0-19-508345-8. Archived from the original on 2016-11-09. Retrieved 2016-10-18.
5. "Latin Extended-D" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-03-25. Retrieved 2019-03-06.
6. Everson, Michael; et al. (2002-03-20). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-02-19. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
7. Ruppel, Klaas; Aalto, Tero; Everson, Michael (2009-01-27). "L2/09-028: Proposal to encode additional characters for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-10-11. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
8. Everson, Michael; Jacquerye, Denis; Lilley, Chris (2012-07-26). "L2/12-270: Proposal for the addition of ten Latin characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-03-30. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
9. Everson, Michael; Baker, Peter; Emiliano, António; Grammel, Florian; Haugen, Odd Einar; Luft, Diana; Pedro, Susana; Schumacher, Gerd; Stötzner, Andreas (2006-01-30). "L2/06-027: Proposal to add Medievalist characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-09-19. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
10. Stephen Phillips (2009-06-04). "International Morse Code". Archived from the original on 2014-02-12. Retrieved 2014-02-10.

External links

• Media related to K at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of K at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of k at Wiktionary