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Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

The letter ‹A› is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈeɪ/) is spelled ‹a›; the plural is aes, though this is rare.^[1]

[edit] History

‹A› can be traced to a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet.^[2]

Egyptian	Proto-Semitic ox's head	Phoenician aleph	Greek Alpha	Etruscan A	Roman A

Circa 1600 B.C. the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew aleph.

Blackletter A	Uncial A	Another Blackletter A
Modern Roman A	Modern Italic A	Modern Script A

When the Ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for the glottal stop that the letter had denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages, so they used the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and kept its name with a minor change (alpha). In the earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark Ages, dating to the 8th century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the Greek alphabet of later times it generally resembles the modern capital letter, although many local varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at which the cross line is set.

the Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. The Roans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write Latin, and the resulting letter was preserved in the modern Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English.

Typographic variants include a double-story and single-story a.

The letter has two minuscule (lower-case) forms.The form used in most current handwriting, consists of a circe and vertical stoke (‹ɑ›), called Latin alpha or "script a". Most printed material uses a form consisting of a small loop with an arc over it (‹a›). Both derive from the majuscule (capital) form. In Greek handwriting, it was common to join the left leg and horizontal stroke into a single loop, as demonstrated by the Uncial version shown. Many fonts then made the right leg vertical. In some of these, the serif that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form.

[edit] Usage

In English, ‹a› by itself usually denotes the near-open front unrounded vowel (/æ/) as in pad, the open back unrounded vowel (/ɑː/) as in father, or, in concert with a later orthographic vowel, the diphthong /eɪ/ as in ace and major, due to effects of the great vowel shift.

In most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, ‹a› denotes an open central unrounded vowel (/a/). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, variants of ‹a› denote various vowels. In X-SAMPA, capital ‹A› denotes the open back unrounded vowel and lowercase ‹a› denotes the open front unrounded vowel.

‹A› is the third most common letter in English, and the second most common in Spanish and French. In one study, on average, about 3.68% of letters used in English tend to be ‹a›s, while the number is 6.22% in Spanish and 3.95% in French.^[3]

‹A› is often used to denote something or someone of a better or more prestigious quality or status: A, A+ or A*, the best grade that can be assigned by teachers for students' schoolwork; A grade for clean restaurants; A-List celebrities, etc. The number 1 is used in a similar way.

A turned ‹a› (‹ɐ›) is used by the International Phonetic Alphabet for the near-open central vowel, while a turned capital ‹A› (‹∀›) is used in predicate logic to indicate universal quantification.

Alternative representations of A

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Alpha	·–

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

[edit] Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital ‹A› is codepoint U+0041 and the lower case ‹a› is U+0061.^[4]

The ASCII code for capital ‹A› is 65 and for lower case ‹a› is 97; or in binary 01000001 and 01100001, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital ‹A› is 193 and for lowercase ‹a› is 129.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "A" and "a" for upper and lower case, respectively.

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: A

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article A.

• ª
• Æ
• Alpha
• Cyrillic A

[edit] References