English is beautiful!

Just having “Q” may seem easier- however- that would be an odd case, and formal English is very careful about using letters alone as nouns since having a bunch of entire words that are just letters would rather complicate reading. Imagine if each letter in this sentence could be a letter as part of a word- or each letter could be it’s own word. Hard to read that, especially of poor penmanship or typography/punctuation/grammar are used. But the letter “Q” in Latin could be a K or a C which to us would be a K or G sound. Latin had rules for where each was used, and as Latin evolved the C or G replaced Q in most cases except where K was followed by a W. “Q” the letter is pronounced “kju,” “Queue” is pronounced “kyoo.” Queue comes to us through the Latin cauda or coda- and as we mentioned earlier- C and Q were relatives.

But it’s more the French we can thank for the word- I’ve written quite a bit so won’t get into the finer points of the history of French spelling- but “French” as a codified language didn’t really start to exist until around the 12th century. The people of France didn’t generally refer to themselves as speaking “French” as there were many dialects spoken by region etc. in fact “French” wasn’t technically the official language of France until 1992! it gets complicated- but early “French” spelling was not really standardized. The adoption of standardized spelling brought challenges of its own but laid the work for modern French.

The French used the word “Queue,” but spelled it very differently. It evolved and became “queue” which the English adopted. Understanding how “French” words come from several sources and follow both popular Latin as well as classic Latin is key to explaining some of the confusion of the spelling- but basically through Latin roots, to The way the French language uses and used Latin, through the standardization of French language- the word “queue” took on what seems to be completely excessive letters but on analysis we can see that it actually makes sense. When W is used other than in digraph (“Q” without the “U”, which is another good over from Latin and it’s rules for “Q”,) is is almost always making the “K” sound as we saw with “kyoo” aka “Queue,” which was originally spelled with a “K” in French.

In English- a “Q” without a “U” generally is used for a sound that isn’t native to English or is uncommon in English. In the case of “queue,” this is apt since the word is not a native English word- much in the same way we do not write a word like “Iraq” as “Iraqu” in English- because the spelling “Iraq” is meant to be an analog to the native pronunciation using English letters- and “Q” as a “K” stand in is the proper letter for the job. Looking at how a word is spelled often tells us quite a bit about the word itself. In that way the superfluous spellings of some words makes sense. In writing- “Cue” and “queue” look very different but could sound very alike out loud- but if we look at the spelling we can easily see which word comes from which root which can tell us the meaning or give us clues. The root of “Cue” is actually... “cue,” which is anglicized from “queue” which in the old French could often be spelled as... “cue”!

But... “cue” was more a “natural” spelling and without going down THAT rabbit hole- would be very confusing. The use of the ueue comes across to get the correct length for the pronunciation so that it isn’t seen as “que...” confusing indeed. Over time Cue in old French seems to morph to coe which is somewhat incorrect for its Latin roots, and we find ourselves back at the twelfth century where “French” really started to become a thing and it was now codified as “queue” in the style of the time. English applied it’s own rules and came up with “cue-“ but “cue” and “queue” somewhat diverged- and in American English “queue” isn’t a very common word with words like “line” etc used instead. In math and computing where a “line” is already used to refer to other concepts- “queue” is often used even in America- and may be the most common usage in American English.

The use of “queue” instead of “cue” is most likely because of the fact that “cue” in American English is most commonly used to refer to a stick used for billiards/pool, or as a type of signal often used in entertainment, and is not despite its origins generally related to queue in meaning. But that’s speculation and I do not have a full etymology of the data or mathematics use of queue- and it’s very possible it was inherited from British English mathematics but F if I know.