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Learn more about "A"
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A
The letter '''A''' is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language|English is '''a''' (), plural '''aes''' (rare).["A" ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989). The plural of the letter, as opposed to the name, is ''A''s, A's, ''a''s, a's.]
History
The letter A can be traced to a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet.[
]
The letter has two Lower case|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 language|English, the letter "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 (though the pronunciation varies with the dialect) as in ''ace'' and ''major'', due to effects of the great vowel shift.
In most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, the letter A denotes either an open back unrounded vowel (), or an open central unrounded vowel (). In the help:IPA|International Phonetic Alphabet, variants of the letter 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 language|Spanish and French language|French. On average, about 8.2% of letters in English tend to be ''A''s, while the number is 6.2% in Spanish and 4% in French. Codes for computing
In Unicode the majuscule|capital A is codepoint U+0041 and the Lower case|lowercase a is U+0061.
In Positional notation|positional numeral systems with base higher than 10, A is the character used to represent decimal 10, or in Binary numeral system|binary, 1010
The ASCII code for capital A is 65 and for lowercase a is 97; or in Binary numeral system|binary 01000001 and 01100001, respectively.
The EBCDIC code for capital A is 193 and for lowercase a is 129.
The morse code for A is dit dah or a dot and a dash.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "A" and "a" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
- Alpha (letter)|Alpha
- A (Cyrillic)|Cyrillic A
- ª
- Æ
References
Category:Latin letters
Category:Vowel letters
Category:Requests for audio pronunciation (English)
zh-min-nan:A
simple:A
zh-yue:A
bat-smg:A
Related Images- Typographic variants include a double-story and single-story '''a'''.
Sources: StartLearningNow, Wikipedia | Usage license: GNU FDL
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