The letter Q in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 — five of the six dots raised, everything except dot 6. It is one of the fullest cells and rare enough in English that most readers identify it by density alone.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and Q is part of the family that starts with g. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. This family is worth knowing for what the third step produces: not a letter at all, but the “for” contraction. The full braille alphabet sets all ten families out side by side.

The alphabet runs out before this family does. There are only 26 letters, and the shapes in this part of the cell space went to the words English uses most instead — which is why g plus dots 3 and 6 gives you a whole word rather than a letter. The contraction reference shows the other cells that were assigned this way.

Where Q turns up in Grade 2

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

Writing a capital Q

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 Q 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 Q 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 Q, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.