Did you know?
Did you know?
Is it que, queue, or q?
One of our persistent—and more puzzling—lookups is for the word que, which is entered in our dictionary (capitalized) as an abbreviation for Quebec. Qué is also a Spanish word that means “what.” That is not, however, the word that many people are looking for when they look up que in our dictionary. Que is homophonous with a number of other words, most of which have wildly different spellings and meanings. One of the words that people are looking for when they look up que is queue, a word that means “line” (as in, “We waited in the ticket queue.”) Sometimes people are looking for the homonym cue, or “a signal to start or do something” (“The lights just went out—that’s my cue to start the movie.”). Very occasionally, people look up que for coup, a word that refers to a violent and sudden overthrow or takeover of a government (“reports on the latest coup attempt”). And if you’re looking for the phonetic spelling of the letter q, try again: that’s cue.
Examples of q in a Sentence
Quanta Magazine, 28 Nov. 2023
In the latter, an influential public key encryption algorithm developed in 1982 by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali hinges on multiplying two large primes p and q together and outputting the result, N, along with a number, x, which is not a square modulo N.
—Quanta Magazine, 1 Nov. 2023
Buckingham Palace wanted Meghan Markle to mind her p’s and q’s on Suits.
—Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 30 Aug. 2023
Same goes for the unconventional-for-a-reason q's, a.k.a.
—Women's Health, 5 May 2023
In the 1960s, Atkin and Swinnerton-Dyer computed the q-expansions for scores and scores of modular forms.
—Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 9 Mar. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'q.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near q
Cite this Entry
“Q.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/q. Accessed 27 Jun. 2024.
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