English Words: Q
2,880 words · Page 1 of 58
The seventeenth letter of the English alphabet, called cue and written in the Latin script.
A measure of the quality of an electric circuit; the ratio of the reactance to the resistance.
An infectious disease, resembling influenza, caused by the bacterium Coxiella burnetii (previously classified as Rickettsia burnetii).
A charged soliton that represents the lowest possible energy state of its components and is therefore stable.
A conjectured future day on which quantum computing developments will make it possible to defeat the encryption system that underpins cryptocurrency.
Of a freight ship: conforming to the regulations concerning maximum permitted beam, length, and draft allowed to dock at liquefied natural gas terminals at Qatar.
In the neo-Gricean semantics and pragmatics of Laurence R. Horn: a reformulation of Paul Grice's maxim of quantity combined with the first two submaxims of manner, stating: "Say as much as you can (given R)", and leading to the implicature that if the speaker did not make a stronger statement (or say more), then its denial is (implied to be) true.
A probability plot, which is a graphical method for comparing two probability distributions by plotting their quantiles against each other.
A merchant ship with concealed weaponry, designed to lure submarines into making surface attacks.
A technique by which a laser can be made to produce a pulsed output beam, with much higher power in each pulse than would be produced when operating as a continuous wave.
A cotton swab consisting of short, thin, flexible plastic rods with a swab of cotton/cotton wool at each end; they are typically used for cleaning the ears and other hard-to-reach places.
A measure of the communicative utility of a human language, computed as the product of the language's centrality and its prevalence.
Initialism of quod erat demonstrandum (“what was to be proved; what was to be demonstrated”): placed at the end of a mathematical proof to show that the theorem under discussion is proved.
quod vide; which see (advises the reader to look up a mentioned text for further information).
A waterproof surface of lime plaster treated with slaked lime, oils and fats, used in the ancient Arab world.
A member of the Qadariyya, an early Islamic movement which held that man was endowed by God with free will.
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English alphabetical index for the letter Q contains 2,880 headwords drawn from our Wiktionary-derived dictionary table. At 50 entries per page the browse splits into 58 pages, and you are currently viewing page 1. Every row above is a dictionary-backed entry with a canonical slug, and each links through to a full definition page with pronunciation, senses, etymology, and related-word data where available.
On this page 50 of 50 entries carry a part-of-speech tag and 50 carry at least one stored definition. Coverage varies across letters because Wiktionary volunteers build entries at different speeds for different parts of the alphabet, letters with common starting sounds (S, C, T, P) usually have the densest coverage, while less frequent starters (X, Q, Z) tend to have shorter but more specialised lists. PlainSpell surfaces whatever data is present and links back to the source when a definition is not yet recorded.
For readers using this index as a spelling reference, the guarantee is that every form you see on the list is a documented English headword, not a guess, not a derived inflection lacking a lemma row. If a word you expected to find is absent from the "Q" list, it usually means the form exists only as an inflection of another lemma (e.g. a past participle stored under the infinitive) or the entry has not yet been imported from Wiktionary. Use the search bar or the misspelling lookup to resolve these cases.