Alternativeletter-case form ofQ-word(“(linguistics) question word”).
1985,The Journal of West African Languages:
[…] was derived through morphological means. This is the situation in languages in which the indefinite marker seems to have been derived from theq-word. In other languages theq-word was morphologically derived from the indefinite word.
2000, Maria Soukka,A descriptive grammar of Noon: a Cangin language of Senegal:
Theq-word questions ask for information about that element only which is replaced by the question word. The position of theq-word is in situ of the element it replaces, except when replacing a subject.
2005, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Agatha Beins,Women's Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, Rutgers University Press,→ISBN, page97:
Last semester, I noticed that students in my Introduction to Queer Studies course (Queer Theory/Queer Lives) were just as interested in theb-word (bisexuality) as theq-word (queer). They perked up when I made references to the history of bisexual movements, and by the end of the semester they began to draw interesting connections between "bi" and "queer."
(humorous, at aworkplace) The wordquiet, taken as a badomen that once uttered the workplace will suddenly become exceptionallybusy.
2025, Alice Mah,Red Pockets: A Tale of Inheritance, Ghosts and the Future,Doubleday Canada,→ISBN, page128:
Even among Western doctors and surgeons, there is a widely held superstition about theq-word - 'quiet' - which should never be spoken during a hospital shift.
Any word beginning withq, especially one that is not normally taboo but is considered (often humorously) to be so in the given context.
