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A very peculiar letter

There are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet. All of these letters, so we assume, are of equal status, and equal interest to people. Yet if this is true, then why are so little words starting with the letter Q? Is it not just an ordinary letter, located between the P and R?

Q is a letter which is not used very often in most European countries. If you open a dictionary at a random page, there is a big chance you will not be looking at words which start with a Q. This is because there is only a small percentage of words in a English/Dutch/German (or any other Western Language) dictionary which start with the letter Q. Most of the words that sound like they might start with a Q, are often written by using the letter K. Especially in the New Dutch Orthography where many words that used to begin with "Qu" have been eliminated by replacing it with "Kw" (Quantum --> Kwantum), which sounds the same, but of course makes the Q very scarce in the Dutch language.

So most of the words in a dictionary do not begin with a Q. Except, of course, for the words in the “Q chapter" in the dictionary. Most likely almost all (and probably all) words at the Q-section of a dictionary start with the letter Q. And inside the Q-section of a dictionary, the density of Q-words is almost unbelievably high compared to any other passage or chapter in the dictionary.

The scarcity of the letter Q is probably one of the reasons why in the board-game Scrabble, while the letter Q is one of the letters which gives most points when used properly, most people would rather not have a Q in their possession during the game.
The old Aztecs from South-America had more imagination and made up names like "Quetzalcoatl" and "Tloquenahuaque" for their gods. Too bad Scrabble had not been invented at the time of the Aztecs.

Our first attempt to add an Q article to this Encyclopedia failed because, in the end, the article we had in mind did not start with the letter Q at all.

For examples of words which do start with a Q, see the links on the left.