Almost every guide to Gillette date codes contains the same sentence in some form: the alphabet has twenty-five letters because Gillette never used Q. It is repeated so often that it reads as settled. In this archive it is treated as a conflict, because the sources do not agree, and the disagreement is printed rather than smoothed away. Here is what each of them actually says.
The case for a twenty-five letter alphabet
The strongest statement comes from the 2026 tool site, which is the only source in this archive that states the rule and the consequence in one breath. Its wording is that the alphabet has 25 letters in it, not 26; that Gillette never used Q; that the sequence runs A through P, jumps straight to R and carries on to Z; and that this is why 1970 is P and 1971 is R with nothing in between. It then names the error directly, saying that at least one well ranked date code chart lists both Q and R as 1971.
There is a physical explanation attached to it, and it is the part worth keeping. The same source says that if you think you are reading a Q, it is almost certainly a worn O or a G. That is a claim about worn metal rather than about the alphabet, and it is consistent with the second half of its note: a blurred 0 or 1 reads as an O or an I.
The case for the letter that appears anyway
The collector wiki, which is the canon for the United States tables and the source this archive leans on most heavily, prints a year row for 1971 and, inside that row, the sentence that some razors were produced with Gillette code-Q. It does not say the letter was in general use, and it does not retract the surrounding rows. But it is a printed observation from the most conservative source in the field, and it cannot be ignored.
A third source, the adjustable-razor archive, goes further in a way that is easy to miss: its table for the years 1955 to 1988 contains both rows, Q against 1971 and R against 1971, side by side. In other words the table itself was compiled with the ambiguity unresolved, which is more revealing than either of the prose statements.
Why a Q is easy to see and hard to believe
Two mechanisms make a Q plausible on a razor. The first is wear: an O with a weak or partial tail from a neighbouring strike, or a G with its spur half erased, reads as a Q under a loupe. The second is the position of the letter in the row: the code is stamped into a corner of the guard, which is one of the first places a razor takes a knock, and 1971 sits in the middle of the soft metal era of the 1970s.
What that means in practice is that Q is the one letter on a Gillette razor where the mark itself is the least reliable evidence in the whole system. Neither position can be selected from the stamp alone.
What this archive does with a Q
The alphabet used for the date-code system here excludes Q, and any razor stamped with one is answered as a conflict rather than as a year. In practice that means:
- The stamp is recognised and named as a conflict between the sources rather than as a letter with a value.
- The most likely reading is offered — a worn O or G — with the note that this is a physical explanation and not a decoding.
- The printed counter-evidence is repeated rather than suppressed: the collector wiki row that mentions code-Q, and the table that prints Q and R against 1971.
- Where the razor model resolves the underlying year, that route is offered instead: a 1971 razor can often be placed by its family and features.
This is deliberately less satisfying than a decoder that returns a year. It is also the only answer the evidence supports.
The other letters that are not years
The Q problem is part of a wider point worth carrying away: several letters on a Gillette are not year letters at all, and one of them is a letter that is a year letter elsewhere. The letters V, W, Y and Z appear as plant marks — Spain, France, England and Canada respectively — and a razor carrying one of them at the end of a number must not be run through the American year table. One of the sources prints Y as Britain and another as England; it is the same plant, at Leicester, and the difference is a difference of wording.
So the alphabet has to be read in context twice over. A letter that is not on the list is a candidate for wear; a letter that is on the list may still not be a year if it is standing on a plant mark. Read the full system on the date-code page, then the country and plant mark page for the plant letters, and start from the date-code article for the mechanics.