K is the eleventh letter of the modern
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English is spelled
kay ().
History and usage
The letter K comes from the Greek Κ (
kappa), which was taken from the
Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand.
["K". The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, online ] This in turn was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing D in the Egyptian word for hand,
d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.
The Semitic value of was maintained in most classical as well as modern languages, although Latin abandoned the use of K almost completely, preferring
C. When
Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was converted to C, with a few exceptions such as the term
kalendae (
calends) and the
praenomen Kaeso.
Some words from other alphabets were also transliterated into C. Therefore, the
Romance languages have K only in words from still other language groups. The
Celtic languages also chose C over K, and this influence carried over into
Old English. Today, English is the only
Germanic language to productively use hard C in addition to K (although
Dutch uses it in learned words of Latin origin and follows the same "hard / soft" distinction in such words as does French and English – but not in native words).
Some English linguists prefer to reverse the Latin transliteration process for proper names in Greek, spelling
Hecate as "Hekate", for example. And the writing down of languages that don't have their own alphabet with the Latin one has resulted in a standardization of the letter for this sound, as in
Kwakiutl.In the
International Phonetic Alphabet, [k] is the symbol for the
voiceless velar plosive.
Several other alphabets also use characters with sharp angles to indicate the sound or syllables that start with a , for example:
Arabic ك,
Hebrew כ (in some fonts),
Korean ㄱ. This kind of phonetic-visual association was studied by
Wolfgang Köhler. However, there are also many examples of rounded letters for , like ค in
Thai and Ք in
Armenian.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the
capital K is codepoint U+004B and the
lower case k is U+006B.
The
ASCII code for capital K is 75 and for lowercase k is 107; or in
binary 01001011 and 01101011, correspondingly.
The
EBCDIC code for capital K is 210, and for lowercase k, 146.
The
numeric character references in
HTML and
XML are "
K" and "
k" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
