The letter K in braille

How to recognise it

The second decade begins here: k is a with dot 3 added. Every letter from k to t is a decade-1 letter plus that one extra dot at the bottom left.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and K is part of the family that starts with a. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning K on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. All twenty-six letters are laid out family by family.

Where K turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, K is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “knowledge”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary k. That is the rule beginners trip on most: knowledge is a single cell, but the k in a word like “key” is just a letter.

Writing a capital K

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital K is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from K by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with K, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.