A

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For the English indefinite article, see English articles § Indefinite article. For other uses, see A (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, "A#" redirects here. For A-sharp, see A-sharp (disambiguation).

ISO 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
Writing cursive forms of A

A (named /ˈeɪ/, plural As, A's, as, a's or aes[nb 1]) is the first letter and the first vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.[1] It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives.[2] The upper-case version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lower-case version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type.

History

Egyptian   Cretan Phoenician
aleph		 Semitic
Greek
Alpha		 Etruscan
A		 Roman/Cyrillic
A		 Boeotian
800–700 BC		 Greek
Uncial		 Latin 300 AD
Uncial

The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet,[3] which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it from a true alphabet). In turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script[4] influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended.

In 1600 B.C.E., the Phoenician alphabet letter had a linear form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name is thought to have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic 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 a letter to represent the glottal stop—the consonant sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages, and that was the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation of the letter—so they used their version of the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and called it by the similar name of 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 the Latin language, and the resulting letter was preserved in the Latin alphabet that would come to be used to write many languages, including English.

Typographic variants

Different glyphs of the lowercase letter A.

During Roman times, there were many variant forms of the letter "A". First was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other "permanent" mediums. There was also a cursive style used for everyday or utilitarian writing, which was done on more perishable surfaces. Due to the "perishable" nature of these surfaces, there are not as many examples of this style as there are of the monumental, but there are still many surviving examples of different types of cursive, such as majuscule cursive, minuscule cursive, and semicursive minuscule. Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles. The known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial.[5]

Typographic variants include a double-storey a and single-storey ɑ.

At the end of the Roman Empire (5th century AD), several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. Among these were the semicursive minuscule of Italy, the Merovingian script in France, the Visigothic script in Spain, and the Insular or Anglo-Irish semi-uncial or Anglo-Saxon majuscule, of Great Britain. By the 9th century, the Caroline script, which was very similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making, before the advent of the printing press. This form was derived through a combining of prior forms.[5]

15th-century Italy saw the formation of the two main variants that are known today. These variants, the Italic and Roman forms, were derived from the Caroline Script version. The Italic form, also called script a, is used in most current handwriting and consists of a circle and vertical stroke. This slowly developed from the fifth-century form resembling the Greek letter tau in the hands of medieval Irish and English writers.[3] The Roman form is used in most printed material; it consists of a small loop with an arc over it ("a").[5] 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.

Italic type is commonly used to mark emphasis or more generally to distinguish one part of a text from the rest (set in Roman type). There are some other cases aside from italic type where script a ("ɑ"), also called Latin alpha, is used in contrast with Latin "a" (such as in the International Phonetic Alphabet).

Use in writing systems

English

In modern English orthography, the letter ⟨a⟩ represents at least seven different vowel sounds:

The double ⟨aa⟩ sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark.[6] However, ⟨a⟩ occurs in many common digraphs, all with their own sound or sounds, particularly ⟨ai⟩, ⟨au⟩, ⟨aw⟩, ⟨ay⟩, ⟨ea⟩ and ⟨oa⟩.

⟨a⟩ is the third-most-commonly used letter in English (after ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩),[7] and the second most common in Spanish and French. In one study, on average, about 3.68% of letters used in English texts tend to be ⟨a⟩, while the number is 6.22% in Spanish and 3.95% in French.[8]

Other languages

In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, ⟨a⟩ denotes an open unrounded vowel, such as /a/, /ä/, or /ɑ/. An exception is Saanich, in which ⟨a⟩ (and the glyph Á) stands for a close-mid front unrounded vowel /e/.

Other systems

In phonetic and phonemic notation:

Other uses

Main article: A (disambiguation)

In algebra, the letter "A" along with other letters at the beginning of the alphabet is used to represent known quantities, whereas the letters at the end of the alphabet (x,y,z) are used to denote unknown quantities.

In geometry, capital A, B, C etc. are used to denote segments, lines, rays, etc.[5] A capital A is also typically used as one of the letters to represent an angle in a triangle, the lowercase a representing the side opposite angle A.[4]

"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. Such associations can have a motivating effect, as exposure to the letter A has been found to improve performance, when compared with other letters.[9]

Finally, the letter A is used to denote size, as in a narrow size shoe,[4] or a small cup size in a brassiere.

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

Computing codes

Character A a
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A LATIN SMALL LETTER A
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 65 U+0041 97 U+0061
UTF-8 65 41 97 61
Numeric character reference A A a a
EBCDIC family 193 C1 129 81
ASCII 1 65 41 97 61
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

Notes

  1. ↑ Aes is the plural of the name of the letter. The plural of the letter itself is rendered As, A's, as, or a's.[1]

Footnotes

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to A.
Look up A or a in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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