Qoph's Hebrew name means the back of the head, and a homiletic tradition, echoed in various forms across popular Jewish teaching on the alphabet, pairs the letter directly with its near look-alike Resh, meaning head, discussed elsewhere in this atlas: where Resh is read as a head held upright, Qoph is read as a head turned away or bowed, and commentators in this tradition have used the pair to contrast the uprightness of the righteous with the turned-away posture of the wicked.
Graphically, Qoph is also one of the few Hebrew letters whose stroke drops below the writing line in its ordinary form, a feature it otherwise shares only with the five sofit final letters discussed elsewhere in this atlas; unlike those five, however, Qoph keeps the identical shape whether it falls in the middle or at the end of a word, one of only a small number of letters, alongside Lamed and Resh, that regularly close a word without ever taking on a distinct final form of their own. Because Qoph is one of the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, a classification covered separately elsewhere in this atlas, its shape-based homiletic pairing with Resh sits alongside, rather than inside, that older mystical classification.