Words with Q and no U: the full list
Almost every word with a Q in English has a U straight after it. Queen, quick, quiet, square, liquid. That is the rule, and it holds so well that most people never think about it.
Then you get a Q in a word game with no U anywhere, and you need to know the exceptions.
There are not many. Here they all are.
The short list
These are the ones almost every word game accepts.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| qi | life force or energy, in Chinese thought. Also spelled chi. |
| qat | a leafy plant people chew in parts of Africa and Arabia. Also khat. |
| qis | more than one qi. |
| qats | more than one qat. |
| qadi | a judge in an Islamic court. Also cadi. |
| qaid | a chief or leader in North Africa. Also caid. |
| qoph | the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. |
| qanat | an underground channel that carries water, used in Iran for thousands of years. |
| qibla | the direction of Mecca, which Muslims face to pray. |
| niqab | a face veil worn by some Muslim women. |
| tranq | short for tranquilliser. |
| qwerty | the ordinary keyboard layout, named after its first six letters. |
Qi is the one to remember. It is two letters, it uses the highest-scoring tile in the box, and it is the single most useful word on this page. If you only learn one, learn that one.
Why the U is there in the first place
English did not invent this. It borrowed it.
The Romans wrote the sound “kw” as QV, and when U and V split into separate letters that became QU. English took the spelling from Latin through French, and it came with the U attached. So the U is not really doing a job of its own — QU is one unit that says “kw”.
That is why words that came into English from other languages break the rule. Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and Persian all have a Q sound that has nothing to do with “kw”, so when we borrowed those words there was no reason to add a U. Qi, qat, qadi, qanat, niqab — every one of them comes from outside the Latin line.
And qwerty breaks it for a completely different reason: it is not a word at all, it is the first six keys of a keyboard read out loud.
Which ones actually count
This is where people get caught out, because different games use different dictionaries.
- Qi and qat are safe nearly everywhere.
- Qadi, qaid, qoph, qanat and qibla are in most of the big word lists.
- Niqab and tranq are newer and some older lists have not caught up.
- Qintar, qindarka and tranqs turn up in tournament word lists but not in everyday games.
If a game refuses one of these, it is not that the word is fake. It is that the game is using a smaller dictionary. There is no single official list of English words, which is the part most people find surprising.
Getting the most out of a Q
A few things worth knowing when a Q lands in front of you.
Look for the U first. The rule holds for the huge majority of words, so before you go hunting for qanat, check whether you have a U sitting right there. Quit, quiz, aqua and equal will win you more games than the exceptions ever will.
Q is worth the most. In most letter games Q is the highest-scoring tile there is. A two-letter qi on the right square beats a long word somewhere useless.
Do not hoard it. People hang on to a Q waiting for a U that never comes. If you can play it, play it.
Watch for QU without a U sound. Queue, quay and lacquer all do odd things. They still have their U, so they follow the spelling rule, but they do not sound like you would expect.
Try it on some letters
If you want to see what a set of letters can make — Q or no Q — the anagram solver here will show you every word in a 172,000-word dictionary that fits, longest first. It handles blank tiles too, so you can check what a Q would be worth if you had one.
And if you want to practise, Anagrove gives everybody the same six letters every day. Five ordinary words to find, then every other word you can spot in the same six. There is no timer and nothing to buy, so there is no cost to sitting and staring at the letters until something turns up — which, with Q words, is usually how it happens.