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 the o ...

, 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 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 a ...

, where it was employed primarily as an

abbreviation An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...

a 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 languages, 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 ...

, 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'', '' 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. It resides in the Latin Extended-D 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 hexadecimal ...

References

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