Literally “whatever you like,” or “nothing in particular.” Borrowed directly into English from Latin. Victorian slang for “right away” or “without delay”-as in “I’ll be there quicksticks!” Also used as a verb in 1930s slang, to mean “to escape from the police.” 21. QUIBOWĪ word from the far north of Scotland for the branch of a tree. QUEUE-PEEĪn old Yorkshire dialect word for a curl of hair on top of a child’s head. Why call it a fire-extinguisher when you can call it a quench-coal? 18. QUEECHERINGĪnother word for the high-pitched cheep made by a duckling. A man who was quean-crazed was ultimately besotted or love-struck. QUEAN-CRAZEDĪt one time an old word for a prostitute, quean came to be used as a nickname for any pretty young woman in the Middle Ages. QUAUMSYĪn old Scots word meaning “out of sorts,” or “slightly unwell.” 13. Heading off in all directions, like an exploding firework. QUANDORUMĪ compliment, or a polite, well-mannered gesture or phrase. Derives from an old English dialect word, quamp, meaning “to dampen someone’s spirits.” 10. “The season for drinking,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. No one is quite sure where this meaning comes from, given that a quadruplator is literally someone who increases something fourfold, but it’s been suggested that there might once have been a four-part punishment for those involved. QUADRUPLATORĪn old term from Roman law for an informer, or for someone paid to attack someone else in court. (A quadrivium was also a course offered at medieval universities, in which students learned the four 'mathematical arts': arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.) 6. A place where three roads meet, incidentally, is a trivium. QUADRIVIUMĪn old word for a crossroads, literally a place where four roads meet. QUADERĪn old Scots word literally meaning “to make something square,” but which can also be used figuratively to mean “to agree with or get along with someone.” 4. QUACKHOODĪ 19th-century word for charlatanism, or falsehood-literally, the state of being a “quack.” 3. QUAALTAGHĪn old Manx word for the first person you see after you leave your front door. Not all of them, unfortunately, are what you could call useful or everyday terms-it’s hard to drop words like querquedule (an old name for the garganey duck) or quarkonium (a meson particle comprising a quark and its corresponding antiquark, apparently) into normal conversation-but you might have better luck with the forty quirky q-words listed here.

It might be the rarest letter at our disposal, but listed under q in the dictionary are a clutch of fantastically bizarre words.

In fact, according to Oxford Dictionaries, you can expect q to account for less than a fifth of 1 percent of a piece of written English-or, put another way, only one letter in every 510 will be a q. Q is the least used letter of the English alphabet.

Words that start with q