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ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
v t e

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is a (Template:PronEng), plural A's, As, as, or a's.

Usage

In English, the letter "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/ (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 (/ɑ/), or an open central unrounded vowel (/a/). In the 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 and French. On average, about 8.2% of letters in English tend to be As, while the number is 6.2% in Spanish and 4% in French.

A also is the English indefinite article, extended to an before a word beginning with a vowel. See a and an.

A- also is a prefix that serves to negate the morpheme to which it is attached, such as amoral, apolitical, etc. This derives from Greek.

Codes for computing

class="template-letter-box | In Unicode the capital A is codepoint U+0041 and the lowercase a is U+0061.

In positional numeral systems with base higher than 10, A is the character used to represent decimal 10, or in binary, 1010

The ASCII code for capital A is 65 and for lowercase 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 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
• Cyrillic A
• ª
• Ã
• Ä
• Å (Aa)
• Æ
• Ă
• ∀

External references

1. "a", Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, (1993)
2. Merriam-Webster's Manual for Writers and Editors p. 61 (1998); Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2003) p. 281
3. "Percentages of Letter frequencies per Thousand words". Retrieved 2006-05-01.

• Latin letters
• Vowel letters
• Requests for audio pronunciation (English)