The letter ‹
A› is the first letter in the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled ‹
a›; the plural is
aes, though this is rare.
History
‹A› can be traced to a
pictogram of an
ox head in
Egyptian hieroglyphs or the
Proto-Sinaitic alphabet.
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.
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 , 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 Romans 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, and in
italic type, consists of a circle and vertical stroke (‹›), called
Latin alpha or "script a". Most printed material uses a form consisting of a small loop with an arc over it (‹›). 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.
Usage
In
English, ‹a› by itself usually denotes the
near-open front unrounded vowel () as in
pad, the
open back unrounded vowel () as in
father, or, in concert with a later orthographic vowel, the diphthong 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 (). 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.
‹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› (‹›) 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.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the
capital ‹A› is codepoint U+0041 and the
lower case ‹a› is U+0061.
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.
See also
