Initial-letter contraction
“know” in braille
Two cells for the whole word, however long it is — 4 letters here, a saving of 2 cells. “know” is 201st in the 5,000-word frequency list this site measures against.
Dots 5, then dots 1-3
Unicode ⠐⠅ — 4 letters in two cells
How to recognise it
Two cells for four letters, and it survives into known, unknown and knowing. Its own relative is the trap: a standalone k is the wordsign for “knowledge”, which is a different word and one cell shorter.
The second cell is the letter k
The second cell is the word's own first letter — the simpler half of this list. The other nine use a groupsign instead.
Where it may appear inside a longer word
The rulebook uses it wherever its letters occur, unless another rule limits it (Rules of Unified English Braille 10.7.1).
This site does the same. The rulebook sets apart Lucknow, and the translator writes it as the rulebook does.
From the rulebook's own examples, as this site writes them. With the sign: acknowledge ⠁⠉⠐⠅⠇⠫⠛⠑; well-known ⠺⠑⠇⠇⠤⠐⠅⠝; knowing ⠐⠅⠬. Without it: Lucknow ⠠⠇⠥⠉⠅⠝⠪.
As with every contraction, it is not used where its letters would reach across the join between the parts of a compound word (10.11).
Updated 27 September 2026. Until 18 September this section gave the positions — start, middle, end — where the sign agreed with the reference translator more often than not, and the translator followed those. It follows the rule above now; the survey explains what changed and why.
Longer words that keep it
4 words among the 5,000 commonest in English are written with this contraction inside them. These are some of them, and every one was taken from this site's own output rather than chosen by hand.
| Word | In braille (Grade 2) | Grade 1 | Grade 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| known | 5 cells | 3 cells | |
| unknown | 7 cells | 5 cells | |
| knows | 5 cells | 3 cells | |
| knowing | 7 cells | 3 cells |
Words where it is written out instead
| Word | Written as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| knowledge | that word is a single k, the alphabetic wordsign — nothing to do with this sign |
The other 21 words under dots 5
The largest of the three prefix groups, so the prefix itself tells you little — the second cell does the work.
character, day, ever, father, here, lord, mother, name, one, ought, part, question, right, some, there, through, time, under, where, work, young.
In a whole book
In a count over the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (26,439 words), this contraction is written 92 times and saves 184 cells. That is 0.53% of everything Grade 2 saves in the book, and ranks it 50th of the 158 contractions used.
The words it is written in: know (87), knowing (2), knows (2), known (1).
Check your own text
Type “know” into the translator with Grade 2 selected to see both cells, or take the full list.
“know” in braille as an image
Both cells as a picture: dot 5, then dots 1 and 3 — the whole word in two cells rather than 4 letters.
