K, or k, is the eleventh letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the

alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English
is kay (pronounced /ˈkeɪ/), plural kays.[1] The letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive.

History
Proto-
Egyptian Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Greek Latin
Canaanite
hieroglyph D K kaph Kappa K
kap

The letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kaph, the
symbol for an open hand.[2] This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semitic tribes who had lived in Egypt
from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing /ḏ/ in the Egyptian word for hand, ⟨ḏ-r-t⟩ (likely
pronounced /ˈcʼaːɾat/ in Old Egyptian). The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead,
because their word for hand started with that sound.[3]

K was brought into the Latin alphabet with the name ka /kaː/ to differentiate it from C,
named ce (pronounced /keː/) and Q, named qu and pronounced /kuː/. In the
earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the
sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used before a rounded
vowel (e.g. ⟨EQO⟩ 'ego'), K before /a/ (e.g. ⟨KALENDIS⟩ 'calendis'), and C elsewhere. Later, the use
of C and its variant G replaced most usages of K and Q. K survived only in a few fossilized forms
such as Kalendae, "the calends".[4]

After Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was transliterated as a C. Loanwords from other
alphabets with the sound /k/ were also transliterated with C. Hence, the Romance
languages generally use C, in imitating Classical Latin's practice, and have K only in later loanwords
from other language groups. The Celtic languages also tended to use C instead of K, and this
influence carried over into Old English.

Pronunciation and use

Pronunciations of Kk hide

Dialect(s
Language Pronunciation (IPA) Environment Notes
)

Esperanto /k/ hard

 /k/ hard
Faroese
/tʃʰ/ soft

/c/ soft Latinization

Greek
/k/ hard Latinization

/cʰ/ soft

/ç/ soft, lenited

Icelandic
/kʰ/ hard

/x/ hard, lenited

Mandarin Standard /kʰ/ Pinyin latinization

/ç/ soft
Norwegian
/k/ hard

/k/ hard
Swedish
/ɕ/ soft

/c/ soft
Turkish
/k/ hard
English
English is now the only Germanic language to productively use "hard" ⟨c⟩ (outside the digraph ⟨ck⟩)
rather than ⟨k⟩ (although Dutch uses it in loan words of Latin origin, and the pronunciation of these
words follows the same hard/soft distinction as in English).[citation needed]

The letter ⟨k⟩ is silent at the start of an English word when it comes before the letter ⟨n⟩, as in the
words knight, knife, knot, know, and knee.

Like J, X, Q, and Z, the letter K is not used very frequently in English. It is the fifth least frequently
used letter in the English language, with a frequency in words of about 0.8%.

Number
In the International System of Units (SI), the SI prefix for one thousand is kilo-, officially abbreviated
as k: for example, prefixed to metre/meter or its abbreviation m, kilometre or km signifies a thousand
metres. As such, people occasionally represent numbers in a non-standard notation by replacing the
last three zeros of the general numeral with K, as in 30K for 30,000.

Other languages
In most languages where it is employed, this letter represents the sound /k/ (with or
without aspiration) or some similar sound.

Other systems
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨k⟩ for the voiceless velar plosive.