Q-word
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Alternative letter-case form of Q-word (“(linguistics) question word”). alt-of
"[…] was derived through morphological means. This is the situation in languages in which the indefinite marker seems to have been derived from the q-word. In other languages the q-word was morphologically derived from the indefinite word."
- 2 A question word.
"Cross-linguistically, a distinctive characteristic of this mood type is the presence of a question word (‘Q-word’) in the clause that queries missing information [...]"
- 3 The word queer.
"Last semester, I noticed that students in my Introduction to Queer Studies course (Queer Theory/Queer Lives) were just as interested in the b-word (bisexuality) as the q-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.""
- 4 Alternative letter-case form of q-word (“any word beginning with q”). alt-of
- 5 The word quiet, taken as a bad omen that once uttered the workplace will suddenly become exceptionally busy. humorous
"Even among Western doctors and surgeons, there is a widely held superstition about the q'''-word - 'quiet' - which should never be spoken during a hospital shift."
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- 6 Any word beginning with q, especially one that is not normally taboo but is considered (often humorously) to be so in the given context.
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"[…] was derived through morphological means. This is the situation in languages in which the indefinite marker seems to have been derived from the q-word. In other languages the q-word was morphologically derived from the indefinite word."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.