Is Q on the Periodic Table?

Q does not appear anywhere on the periodic table. Of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, Q is one of just two that have never been used as part of any element’s chemical symbol, the other being J. All 118 confirmed elements get by with the remaining 24 letters, and the conventions governing how symbols are chosen make it unlikely Q will show up anytime soon.

The Two Letters the Periodic Table Skips

Every element on the periodic table has a one- or two-letter symbol. Hydrogen is H, helium is He, and so on through oganesson at Og. If you go through the full list of symbols from element 1 to element 118, you will find every letter of the English alphabet represented at least once except for Q and J. That is not an accident or an oversight. It reflects the historical languages that gave elements their names, particularly Latin and Greek, where Q and J were either absent or rarely used in the roots that ended up becoming element names.

Some letters pull heavy duty. The letter S appears in dozens of symbols, either alone (sulfur, S) or as the second letter in combinations like Os (osmium), Cs (cesium), and Ds (darmstadtium). Others, like X, show up only once (xenon, Xe). But Q and J sit at zero, entirely unused across all 118 entries.

Why Symbols Often Look Nothing Like English Names

If you have ever wondered why sodium’s symbol is Na instead of So, or why gold is Au instead of Go, the answer is that chemical symbols were standardized using Latin (and sometimes Greek or Arabic) names rather than English ones. Sodium comes from the Latin “natrium,” gold from “aurum,” lead from “plumbum” (Pb), and mercury from “hydrargyrum” (Hg). The Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius established the convention in the early 1800s of using one or two letters from an element’s Latin name, and that framework stuck.

This Latin bias is exactly why Q never gained a foothold. Latin used the letter Q almost exclusively in the combination “qu,” and no element drew its classical name from a root beginning with or prominently featuring Q. Greek, the other major source language for chemical terminology, did not use Q at all; its alphabet has no equivalent letter. So from the very beginning, Q had no natural path onto the table.

J has a similar story. The letter J did not exist as a distinct letter in classical Latin. It developed later as a variant of I in medieval script and was not fully recognized as its own letter until the 16th or 17th century. By the time modern chemistry was formalizing its symbols, the tradition of drawing from classical roots was already locked in, and J had no seat at the table.

How New Elements Get Their Symbols

When physicists synthesize a new superheavy element and accumulate enough evidence to claim its discovery, the claim goes through a rigorous review. IUPAC (the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) and IUPAP (the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) jointly evaluate whether the discovery meets established criteria. These criteria were originally set down about thirty years ago by a Transfermium Working Group, and in 2016 the two organizations established a new Joint Working Group to continue overseeing the process.¹

Once a discovery is confirmed, the discoverers are invited to propose both a name and a symbol. IUPAC’s Inorganic Chemistry Division then reviews the proposal, and the broader chemistry community gets a period to comment before the name becomes official.² The naming recommendations include specific constraints. New element names must end in “-ium” (for consistency with the majority of element names), and discoverers can name elements after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place, a property of the element, or a scientist. The symbol must be two letters, with the first capitalized and the second lowercase.

There is no explicit rule banning Q from a symbol. In principle, a team that discovers element 119 could propose a name starting with Q and use Q as the first letter of the symbol. But IUPAC’s guidelines steer names toward roots that sound natural across major world languages and follow established phonetic traditions. A name starting with Q would need to end in “-ium” (so something like “quintessium” or “quarkium,” hypothetically), and nothing in the history of element naming suggests such a proposal is on anyone’s radar. Discoverers overwhelmingly gravitate toward names honoring people, places, and classical roots, none of which naturally lead to Q.

Temporary Names and the Systematic Placeholders

Before a newly synthesized element receives its permanent name, it gets a temporary systematic name built from Latin and Greek number roots. Element 118, for example, was temporarily called “ununoctium” (un-un-oct = 1-1-8) with the placeholder symbol Uuo. This system was designed by IUPAC to give every conceivable element number a pronounceable, unambiguous temporary name using a fixed set of roots: nil (0), un (1), bi (2), tri (3), quad (4), pent (5), hex (6), sept (7), oct (8), and enn (9).

Notice “quad” for the digit 4. If an element were discovered with the number 140, its temporary name would be “unquadnilium” and its placeholder symbol would be Uqn. That would put Q into the periodic table, at least temporarily. The same applies to elements 141 through 149, and to any future element with a 4 in its atomic number (240, 340, and so on, though synthesis of elements that heavy remains far beyond current technology). So in the placeholder system, Q has a reserved role. It just has not been needed yet because no element with a 4 in a position beyond the first digit has been synthesized. Elements 104 through 118 all received permanent names years ago, so their temporary Uq-prefixed names are historical footnotes.

In practice, these placeholder names are used only in scientific literature during the gap between synthesis and official naming, which can last several years. Once a permanent name is adopted, the placeholder disappears from the table. So even if element 140 is someday created and briefly carries “Uqn” as its symbol, Q’s tenure on the periodic table would be temporary unless the discoverers chose a permanent name that also featured it.

Could Future Elements Bring Q Onto the Table for Good

The honest answer is that it is theoretically possible but practically unlikely in any foreseeable timeframe. The next elements to be synthesized, elements 119 and 120, are the subject of active research at laboratories in Russia, Japan, and the United States. Their temporary names would be “ununennium” (Uue) and “unbinilium” (Ubn), neither of which involves Q. And when discoverers propose permanent names, they tend to follow well-worn patterns.

Consider the most recently named elements: nihonium (Nh, after Japan), moscovium (Mc, after Moscow), tennessine (Ts, after Tennessee), and oganesson (Og, after physicist Yuri Oganessian). The naming patterns lean toward geographic and personal tributes with roots in languages that do not prominently feature Q. For Q to make the table permanently, a discovery team would need to choose a name with Q in a prominent enough position that IUPAC selects it for the symbol, and the name would need to survive the public review period. It is not forbidden, but nothing about the culture of element naming suggests it is coming.

Some chemistry enthusiasts have speculated about whether the hypothetical “island of stability,” a predicted region of superheavy elements with unusually long half-lives, could lead to a burst of new discoveries and new naming opportunities. Even in that optimistic scenario, the names would likely follow existing conventions. The phonetic character of Q (nearly always requiring a trailing “u” in English) makes it an awkward fit for the compact, internationally pronounceable symbols the community favors.

Letters That Almost Did Not Make It

While Q and J are the clear holdouts, a few other letters came close to being absent. The letter X appears only in xenon (Xe). The letter Z shows up in just a handful of symbols, including zirconium (Zr), zinc (Zn), and the more recently named elements like flerovium’s neighbor, element 30’s Zn being the classic example. W, which represents tungsten (from the German “Wolfram”), is another letter with minimal representation. But each of these letters had at least one element whose classical or vernacular name contained the letter in a natural position. Q never had that stroke of luck.

It is worth noting that a few element symbols use letters that do not appear in the element’s English name at all. Tungsten’s W (from Wolfram), potassium’s K (from the Latin “kalium”), and antimony’s Sb (from “stibium”) are familiar examples. This means that a letter’s presence or absence on the table is not about English usage. It is about the full sweep of languages that contributed to chemical nomenclature, Latin, Greek, German, Arabic, Swedish, and others. Across all of those languages, Q simply never landed in the right spot.

How Other Writing Systems Handle Element Symbols

The Latin-letter symbols used on the periodic table are an international standard, but not every language uses Latin script in daily life. Chinese, for instance, takes a completely different approach to element names. Rather than borrowing the Latin abbreviation, Chinese uses single-syllable logographs for each element. These are typically constructed as compounds: one component (called a radical) signals the element’s broad material class, such as the radical for metal, stone, gas, or water, while the other component hints at pronunciation.³ In many other languages, element names are simply phonetic borrowings of the internationally recognized name, but the Chinese system builds meaning directly into the character. A reader of Chinese can often guess whether an element is a metal, a gas, or a nonmetal just from looking at its written name.

Russian and other Cyrillic-script languages transliterate the Latin symbols phonetically but use the standard Latin abbreviations in scientific contexts, since those abbreviations function as a universal shorthand across research worldwide. Arabic-script languages do the same. So regardless of local writing systems, the Latin-letter periodic table is the shared reference point, and Q’s absence from it is a universal feature of chemistry, not just an English-language quirk.

Common Misconceptions About Missing Letters

One persistent myth is that IUPAC deliberately excluded Q and J to avoid confusion with other letters or numbers. The reasoning goes that Q could be mistaken for O (oxygen) and J for I (iodine) in messy handwriting. While legibility has occasionally influenced symbol choices in pharmacology and medical prescriptions, there is no evidence that IUPAC banned any letter from element symbols for handwriting reasons. The absence of Q and J is simply a consequence of the linguistic roots that element names draw from. No classical name made Q or J a natural candidate, so no symbol ended up using them.

Another misconception is that every letter of the alphabet was “assigned” to the table intentionally, as if someone sat down and distributed letters. In reality, element symbols accumulated organically over two centuries. Early symbols reflected the Latin names that educated Europeans already used. Later symbols reflected the discoverer’s choice of name, subject to community review. The result is a patchwork, not a designed system, and Q and J fell through the cracks of that patchwork because no element’s etymology called for them.

A subtler misunderstanding involves the letter “q” appearing in element names but not symbols. No currently recognized element has Q anywhere in either its name or its symbol. “Quicksilver” is an old English vernacular term for mercury, but the official IUPAC name is “mercury” and the symbol Hg comes from the Latin “hydrargyrum.” Vernacular names, no matter how widespread, do not determine symbols.

The Alphabet as a Chemical Artifact

The periodic table’s relationship with the alphabet is, in a sense, an accident of European intellectual history. If chemistry had been formalized in a culture that used a different script, the symbols would look entirely different. The fact that we use one- and two-letter Latin abbreviations is a legacy of Berzelius’s Swedish-Latin conventions from the 1810s. Those conventions were practical for their time: Latin was the shared language of European science, and short abbreviations fit neatly into chemical formulas and equations.

Today, those abbreviations persist because they work. They are compact, internationally standardized, and deeply embedded in chemical notation. But they carry the fingerprints of their origin. The letters that appear reflect which sounds and roots mattered in Latin, Greek, German, and a handful of other European languages. The letters that are absent, Q and J, reflect the gaps in those same languages. If you have ever looked at the periodic table and wondered why it seems to use every letter except those two, the answer is not some elegant design principle. It is just the way language and history happened to shake out.