Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The 17th letter of the modern English alphabet.
  • noun Any of the speech sounds represented by the letter q.
  • noun The 17th in a series.
  • noun Something shaped like the letter Q.
  • noun A hypothetical lost manuscript, consisting largely of sayings of Jesus, that is believed to have been the source of those passages in Matthew and Luke that bear close similarity to each other but not to parallel passages in Mark.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An abbreviation of Queen's Bench.
  • The seventeenth letter and thirteenth consonant in the English alphabet.
  • As a medieval Roman numeral, 500.
  • An abbreviation: [lowercase] of quadrans (a farthing)
  • [lowercase] of query
  • [lowercase] of question
  • of queen
  • [lowercase] in a ship's logbook, of squalls
  • in Rom. lit. and inscriptions, of Quintus.
  • A half-farthing: same as cue, 2 .
  • noun An abbreviation of quarter-sessions.
  • An abbreviation of the Latin quasi dictum, as if said;
  • of the Latin quasi dixisset, as if he had said.
  • noun An abbreviation of quartermaster.
  • noun or
  • noun of the Latin phrase quantum sufficit.
  • An abbreviation in psychophysics, of quotient limen;
  • [lowercase] of the Latin quantum libet, as much as is required.
  • A contraction of quiet.
  • noun An abbreviation: of Queen's Council or Queen's Counsel
  • noun of Queen's College.
  • noun or
  • noun or
  • An abbreviation in electrotechnics, of quantity;
  • [lowercase] of quasi;
  • [lowercase] of quintal;
  • of the Latin Quirites.
  • Same as cue, 3 : as, to give or take the Q.
  • In psychophysics, the symbol for the Fechnerian space-error.
  • noun An abbreviation of the Latin phrase quantum vis, ‘as much as you will’
  • noun of quod vide, ‘which see.’
  • Abbreviations of the Latin quantum placeat, as much as seems good.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • the seventeenth letter of the English alphabet, has but one sound (that of k), and is always followed by u, the two letters together being sounded like kw, except in some words in which the u is silent. See Guide to Pronunciation, § 249. Q is not found in Anglo-Saxon, cw being used instead of qu; as in cwic, quick; cwen, queen. The name (kū) is from the French ku, which is from the Latin name of the same letter; its form is from the Latin, which derived it, through a Greek alphabet, from the Phœnician, the ultimate origin being Egyptian.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The seventeenth letter of the English alphabet, called cue and written in the Latin script.
  • noun The ordinal number seventeenth, derived from this letter of the English alphabet, called cue and written in the Latin script.
  • noun The seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.
  • noun voiceless uvular plosive.
  • noun physics electrical charge
  • noun physics heat
  • abbreviation sports conditional qualification
  • abbreviation question

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the 17th letter of the Roman alphabet

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Sense 5, probably from German Q(uelle), source.]

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Examples

  • A better alternative is to take the observed values q, q², q³, ¦ as the actual elements of reality, and view Ψ just as a bookkeeping device, determined by the actual values q, q², q³,

    Relational Quantum Mechanics Laudisa, Federico 2008

  • In the last step they arbitrarily introduce a heat density source, Q, and a heat current density term, q, to represent the flow of thermal energy.

    Rabett Run EliRabett 2009

  • Also take the quantities q, q², r, r² of the above lemma (11) to be the single expectation values:

    Bell's Theorem Shimony, Abner 2009

  • In the last step they arbitrarily introduce a heat density source, Q, and a heat current density term, q, to represent the flow of thermal energy.

    Archive 2009-04-01 EliRabett 2009

  • The problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics takes then different forms, depending on the relative ontological weight we choose to assign to the wave function Ψ or, respectively, to the sequence of the measurement outcomes q, q², q³, ¦.

    Relational Quantum Mechanics Laudisa, Federico 2008

  • Indeed, as far as its later behavior is concerned, the combined system S+O may very well be in a quantum superposition of alternative possible values q, q², q³, ¦.

    Relational Quantum Mechanics Laudisa, Federico 2008

  • This "second observer" situation captures the core conceptual difficulty of the interpretation of quantum mechanics: reconciling the possibility of quantum superposition with the fact that the observed world is characterized by uniquely determined events q, q², q³, ¦.

    Relational Quantum Mechanics Laudisa, Federico 2008

  • But even if we can circumvent the collapse problem, the more serious difficulty of this point of view is that it appears to be impossible to understand how specific observed values q, q², q³, ¦ can emerge from the same

    Relational Quantum Mechanics Laudisa, Federico 2008

  • If Row and Column cooperate with probabilities p and q (and defect with probabilities p* = 1-p and q* = 1-q), for example, then the expected value of the payoff to Row is p*qT+pqR+p*q*P+pq*S.

    Prisoner's Dilemma Kuhn, Steven 2007

  • But mostly we are interested in computing (j smaller than p), and q ' title='p(x_j|z_p..q), jq ' class='latex' /.

    More Bender on Hurricane Counts « Climate Audit 2006

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  • The only letter that does not appear in any U.S. state name.

    January 14, 2010