A blog for fans of Bananagrams, word games, puzzles, and amazing things

Friday, May 29, 2009

Q-without-U words

My one concession to the Scrabble-memorizer approach is to know some of the Q-without-U words, as they are so useful in Bananagrams. Also, I do not like to invoke the DUMP rule.

A faqir is another spelling for "fakir", which is like a Hindu monk or ascetic. Tell your friends that it is the name for those guys who sleep on a bed of nails.

A qaid is an Arab chief. The Arabic language is big on the Q-without-U, as we will see.

A qanat is a system for distributing water in arid climates, developed by the ancient Persians, but still in used today. It's basically an underground tunnel, channeling water from some source along a path, and then there are wells drilled down at different positions along its trajectory. It has its own Wikipedia page! If you have more than one, you have qanats.

A qat is an evergreen shrub found in East Africa and Arabia, used as a narcotic (similar in effect and intensity to ecstasy). Possibly one of the shortest words for a drug. (Individual letters and acronyms don't count! Show me the vowels!) You can also make references to "shrubbery" to diffuse any qat-related tension.

A qintar is the Albanian penny. Probably you will never use this one, when you can just make qat.

Qoph is the 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It looks like this:

It is mainly useful when making minimal pangrams: "Vext cwm fly zing jabs Kurd qoph".


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