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Movable type p's and q's could be easily mistaken, especially as they are mirror-reversed from the printed result. According to Michael Quinion, "investigations by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2007 when revising the entry turned up early examples of the use of Ps and Qs to mean learning the alphabet. The first is in a poem by Charles ...
The plural of individual letters is usually written with -'s: [22] there are two h's in this sentence; mind your p's and q's; dot the i's and cross the t's. Some people extend this use of the apostrophe to other cases, such as plurals of numbers written in figures (e.g. "1990's"), words used as terms (e.g. "his writing uses a lot of but's").
As seen in the photo of the composing stick, a lower case 'q' looks like a 'd', a lower case 'b' looks like a 'p', a lower case 'p' looks like a 'b' and a lower case 'd' looks like a 'q'. This is reputed to be the origin of the expression "mind your p's and q's". It might just as easily have been "mind your b's and d's". [3]
Unfortunately, this is not the source of Mind your Ps and Qs, firstly for the obvious reason that almost nobody was fluent in English, one of the p-Celtic, and one of the q-Celtic languages. Secondly the choice of q to represent the c of mac was a modern choice to avoid confusion with the soft c sound (as in cereal ).
The following is an alphabetical list of Greek and Latin roots, stems, and prefixes commonly used in the English language from P to Z. See also the lists from A to G and from H to O . Some of those used in medicine and medical technology are not listed here but instead in the entry for List of medical roots, suffixes and prefixes .
A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be unidirectional , meaning that they list the meanings of words of one language in another, or can be bidirectional , allowing translation to and from both languages.
All of these words are associated with a noun that has different meanings (hint: one definition of the noun refers to a flat-bodied fish with a long, whip-like tail). Related: 300 Trivia Questions ...
The dictionary was first considered in 2006 when Koenig was studying at Macalester College, Minnesota and attempting to write poetry.The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows was the idea he came up with that would contain all the words he needed for his poetry, including emotions that had never been linguistically described. [11]