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K

K (lowercase k) is the eleventh letter of the modern Latin alphabet as used for English, representing in most languages the voiceless velar plosive sound /k/, the consonant that begins English "kite" and "king".¹^•² It is unusual among Latin letters in having changed very little in shape over roughly three thousand years, and in having been largely displaced by the letter C in the classical languages from which modern European orthographies descend.³

Key fact	Detail
Alphabet position	Eleventh letter of the Roman alphabet as used for English¹
Sound value	Voiceless velar plosive /k/, as in "kite" or "king"²
Origin	From the West Semitic letter kaph, "palm" or "hand"; the Greek name was Kappa⁴^•⁵
Classical Latin use	Soon replaced by C; survived only in abbreviations such as Kal. for Kalendae and the name Kaeso⁵
Unicode encoding	U+004B, decimal 75, one byte (0x4B) in UTF-8 and ASCII; lowercase k is U+006B⁶
Other uses	Abbreviation for the metric prefix kilo and for the chemical element potassium²

History

The letter's ancestry runs through the Phoenician alphabet. The sign for the /k/ sound derives from the West Semitic word kaph, meaning "palm" or "hand", which served both as the letter's name and as the source of the Greek name Kappa.⁴ The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica records that K was the eleventh letter in the Phoenician alphabet and in its Greek descendant, the tenth in Latin owing to the omission of Teth, and once more the eleventh in the alphabets of Western Europe after the insertion of J.⁵ Its shape has changed very little: it appears on the Moabite Stone of the early 9th century BC in forms close to the modern one, and the length and joining of the two back strokes are essentially the only variations across Greek inscriptions.⁵

Displacement by C. The substitution of C for K took place in Italy, where the original character survived only in a few well-understood abbreviations; alphabets derived through Italy therefore carry the C, while those derived directly from Greek kept the K.³ In classical Latin, K was found in the earliest inscriptions but was soon replaced by C, surviving in the abbreviations for Kalendae and the proper name Kaeso.⁵ The grammarian Priscian treated it as a superfluous letter, to be used only in words borrowed from Greek, and it is seldom found in Latin authors except in the word kalenda.⁷ A Danish language reference summarizes the classical distribution: Latin originally had three letters for the k-sound, c before e and i, k before a, and q before o and u, with C early crowding out K.⁸

Return to English. In Anglo-Saxon England, C replaced K through Latin influence, since writing was almost entirely in the hands of ecclesiastics and the Roman alphabet had been introduced by missionaries, so the oldest English writings regularly have C and not K.³^•⁵ After 1066, under the influence of Norman-French spelling, both letters were widely used, and after a period of uncertainty, fairly distinct functions emerged for c and k according to position and context.¹ Later, in Latin and then the Romance languages, c came to be pronounced softly before e and i, which left k free to mark the hard c sound in those positions; most Germanic languages took it up for this role.¹

Sound and spelling

The letter K stands for the brief guttural sound made when the back of the tongue is lifted against the rear of the palate; being voiceless, it pairs with the voiced G, and in most modern alphabets where it appears it carries only this sound, though in Swedish it may also represent /ɕ/, especially before the front vowels e, i, y, ä, and ö.³^•¹⁴ In phonetic terms this is the voiceless velar plosive.²

The letter's relation to C and Q is a legacy of shared history rather than of distinct sounds. English spellings distribute /k/ among c, k, and q: the word "kick" begins with k, "quick" with q, and "cow" with c, while "choir" and "chemistry" use ch for a k-sound.⁹ French spelling is more varied still: the sound [k] can be rendered by about a dozen graphies, including c, cu, cc, cch, ch, ck, cq, cqu, k, q, and qu, although c and qu account for most occurrences and the others appear mostly in loanwords.¹⁰

K has also served as a transcription device for foreign k-like sounds. In the colonial orthography developed for Quiché, the letter k was used to represent the phoneme /q/, and in the orthography developed for Yucatec Maya it represented /k'/, a usage the source attributes to a general tradition of using k for any foreign k-like sound rather than to a direct Arabic model.¹¹

Digital encoding

In the Unicode Standard the uppercase letter is U+004B, named LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K, in the Basic Latin block, with general category uppercase letter and bidirectional class left to right.² Its decimal value is 75, and it occupies a single byte, 0x4B, in UTF-8, ASCII, Latin-1, and Windows-1252, while UTF-16 encodes it as 4B 00 or 00 4B depending on byte order.⁶ The lowercase counterpart is U+006B, and the two are linked by the standard case-mapping properties.² The Basic Latin chart also lists a related character, the kelvin sign U+212A, a letterlike symbol for the SI unit of temperature that is visually identical to the letter.¹² Precomposed accented forms exist in the Latin extended blocks, such as U+0136 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH CEDILLA, used in Latvian.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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K

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