q-word

See also: Q-word

English

Alternative forms

• Q-word

Noun

q-word (plural q-words)

1. Alternative letter-case form of Q-word (“(linguistics) question word”).
   • 1985, The Journal of West African Languages:

     […] 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.

   • 2000, Maria Soukka, A descriptive grammar of Noon: a Cangin language of Senegal:

     The q-word questions ask for information about that element only which is replaced by the question word. The position of the q-word is in situ of the element it replaces, except when replacing a subject.

2. The word queer.
   • 2005, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Agatha Beins, Women's Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, page 97:

     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."

3. Any word beginning with q, especially one that is not normally taboo but is considered (often humorously) to be so in the given context.

See also

• (‘x’-word euphemisms) a-word, b-word, c-word, d-word, e-word, f-word, g-word / G-word, h-word, i-word, j-word, k-word, l-word, m-word, n-word, o-word, p-word, q-word / Q-word, r-word, s-word, t-word, u-word, v-word, w-word, x-word; see also C-bomb, f-bomb, f-slur, L-bomb, n-bomb, r-slur