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 the 189th most common word in English.
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
Only at the start and in the middle and at the end and of a word. UEB allows these inside a longer word only where the letters keep their meaning, which spelling cannot decide, so this site settled it by counting: every English word containing “know”, checked against the reference, split by where the letters sat.
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.
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.
