What Do Your P’s and Q’s Truly Mean?

Have you ever been told to 'mind your p’s and q’s'? Unless you were handling a mechanical printing press, you were probably being gently reminded to watch your manners. But what are these p’s and q’s exactly?

The short response is that no one really knows for sure. But just because there's no definitive answer doesn't mean we don't have a few possible explanations. In fact, there are several theories about what the original p’s and q’s could have been, and some are far more convincing than others.

The Politeness Hypothesis

One of the most popular explanations, which also happens to be the simplest, is that p’s sounds somewhat like 'please' and q’s resembles 'thank yous,' so to mind your p’s and q’s essentially means 'to mind your manners.' It’s a neat theory, but not especially convincing: There isn’t enough historical evidence to back it up, indicating this may be a recent piece of folk etymology, influenced by today’s interpretation of p’s and q’s. So, if this isn’t the case, what could it be?

The Scribal Abbreviation Hypothesis

A much lesser-known theory suggests that the origins of your p’s and q’s might trace back to the time when handwritten Latin texts were being widely produced and interpreted.

Latin is challenging enough to grasp under normal circumstances, but during the Medieval era, scholars and scribes seemed determined to make it even more difficult. To keep their texts concise, they developed a complex system of scribal abbreviations, incorporating a variety of symbols—dots, dashes, bars, hooks, tails, stars, and other embellishments—attached to letters to shorten longer words. Anyone attempting to read these texts needed to be cautious in interpreting these symbols, or risk misreading or mistranslating them. Since p and q were among the most frequently altered letters, this would naturally require minding your p’s and q’s.

This is another clever theory, but unfortunately it falters due to a lack of supporting evidence and the fact that the most intricate scribal abbreviations had already fallen out of use long before the phrase p’s and q’s was first used. So, when exactly did that happen?

The Pigtail and Overcoat Hypothesis

The earliest mention of someone’s p’s and q’s comes from a play with a striking title, Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet, written by English playwright Thomas Dekker in 1601. The specific line in question reads: 'Now thou art in thy Pee and Kue, thou hast such a villanous broad backe.'

Dekker’s unusual spelling (pee and kue) and phrasing (“in your p’s and q’s”) have led some to propose that the original p’s and q’s might have referred to items of clothing—specifically, a sailor’s pea-coat or pea-jacket (a heavy, loose-fitting overcoat) and a queue or queue-peruke (a long braid of hair once worn as a fashionable accessory by high-ranking naval officers). But how could a sailor’s pea-coat and a naval officer’s wig translate into a phrase meaning “mind your manners”? That’s an intriguing question, and one that doesn’t have a clear answer—unless, of course, we’re only partway there…

The French Country Dancing Hypothesis

Forget about the pea-coat for a moment. Now, picture yourself wearing your favorite queue-peruke while learning a graceful French court dance. You'd have to be careful not to accidentally hit your fellow dancers with the end of your peruke while concentrating on your footwork. And in French, the word for foot? That would be pied. So, in that case, you'd need to mind your pieds and queues.

If this explanation seems a bit too far-fetched, you’re right to question it. There's no evidence of pieds and queues being used in this way in English, and queue hairpieces didn’t become fashionable in England until the early 18th century—more than 100 years after Dekker’s play. Which brings us to the next theory...

The Let's All Have A Drink Theory

In 1607, five years after the release of Satiromastix, Dekker published another play titled Westward Hoe. It contains the line: 'at her p. and q. neither Marchantes [merchant’s] daughter, Aldermans wife, young countrey Gentle-woman, nor Courtiers Mistris [mistress], can match her.' Same author, same phrase, but with notably different spelling.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the use of periods after the p. and q. in this line suggests they might have originally been abbreviations—meaning the 'pee' and 'kue' used five years earlier could have been phonetic spellings, much like 'aitch' or 'em.' But if p. and q. were abbreviations, what could they stand for?

According to The English Dialect Dictionary, p and q means “prime quality”—though this explanation doesn’t fully account for the and that separates them, suggesting it’s likely another later invention. One improbable theory is that they represent penta and quinque, the Greek and Latin words for 'five,' which would make the original p’s and q’s a reminder to keep Greek and Latin roots separate. However, it seems much more plausible that p and q stands for “pints and quarts,” potentially referring to a landlord calculating a customer’s bill or advising a drinker to watch their intake. Given that a quart contains four pints, it’s also possible that the original meaning was closer to “take care of the small things, and the big things will follow.”

The 'pints and quarts' theory holds some weight, but even the OED admits it can 'neither be substantiated nor dismissed.' Perhaps the most likely explanation is, in fact, one of the simplest.

The Handwriting/Typesetting Hypothesis

This theory, as proposed by Merriam-Webster, suggests that children learning to read and write often mix up their lowercase p’s and q’s. Thus, telling them to 'mind their p’s and q’s' is a reminder to be extra careful to avoid mistakes. Another variation suggests that the original p’s and q’s referred to the individual pieces of moveable type used during the early days of printing. Typesetters, working with letters in reverse order, might have easily confused a lowercase p with a lowercase q and ruined an entire page of text.

There is some evidence to back up the theory that the p’s and q’s you’re told to mind are simply the letters of the alphabet. Oxford Dictionaries, for example, cites several instances where the phrase p’s and q’s is used in a broader sense to mean 'your ABCs.' However, a key problem is that the earliest example they found for this usage only dates back to 1763, while Dekker’s work dates from the early 1600s.

In addition, the letter q is among the least frequently used in the alphabet, which raises the question of why a child (or a typesetter) would more often confuse common letters such as d and b, or t and f, rather than p and q? What led to this being the widely accepted phrase? Despite the doubts, this final theory seems to be the most plausible explanation available—at least, until a better theory is proposed.