Qaf

Qaf, also romanized Qaaf or Qāf, is a letter of the Arabic alphabet. It represents a voiceless uvular stop /q/ in standard Arabic and in most languages that use the Arabic script. The name Qaf reflects its place in the Semitic alphabetic tradition, with its lineage traced back to the Phoenician qoph. In Unicode, the letter is encoded as U+0642.

In written Arabic, Qaf has four contextual forms: isolated ق, initial قـ, medial ـقـ, and final ـق. Like many Arabic letters, it joins to other letters within a word, forming connected script, though some letters block connection to following letters. Visually, Qaf is commonly written with two dots above, a distinctive feature that helps distinguish it from ف (fa), which has one dot above.

Phonology and usage extend beyond Arabic. In Persian, Urdu, Kurdish and related scripts, the letter generally represents the same /q/ phoneme, though actual realization can vary by language or dialect (for example, slight voicing differences in some speech varieties). The letter appears in common vocabulary across languages, such as qalb (heart), qamar (moon), and qalam (pen), though spelling may differ by language and orthographic standards.

Historically, Qaf is related to other Semitic letters such as Hebrew qoph, reflecting a shared origin in early alphabetic writing. Its continued use across many languages underscores its fundamental role in representing a key plosive sound in the broader Arabic-script writing system.