What Does “K” Mean?

The New Yorker runs down the many definitions of this single letter:

1. one kilometre
2. 1,000 monetary units
3. 1,024 bytes of computer-storage space
4. a strikeout in baseball
5. a degree on the Kelvin temperature scale
6. the nation of Korea (as in “K-pop”)
7. the chemical potassium
8. a measure of the fineness of gold (karat)
9. the drug ketamine
10. kindergarten (as in “K-12”)
11. the king in a chess move (as in “Kd2”)
12. a South African racial slur (as in “the K-word”)
13. the shape of a kind of economic recovery
14. a protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novels