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The letter A is the first (1st) letter in the Latin alphabet.
History
The letter A probably started as a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet.
Egyptian hieroglyph
ox head |
Proto-semitic
ox head |
Phoenician aleph |
Greek alpha |
Etruscan A |
Roman A |
By 1600 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the basis for all 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 for the vowel /ɑ/, and changed its name to alpha. In the earliest Greek inscriptions, 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 what was Italy 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.
The modern lowercase letter a derives from Greek handwriting, which evolved from a form similar to the current capital to a circular shape with a projection by the 4th century.
Usage
In English, the letter A by itself usually denotes the lax open front unrounded vowel (IPA /æ/) as in pad, the open back unrounded vowel (IPA /ɑ/) as in father, or, in concert with a later e, the diphthong /eɪ/ (though the actual pronunciation depends on the dialect) as in ace, 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 (IPA /ɑ/), or an open central unrounded vowel (IPA /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 also is the English indefinite article, extended to an before a vowel.
Alternative representations
In the NATO phonetic alphabet the letter A is Alfa (which may also be spelled Alpha in English-only environments).
In international Morse code the letter A is DitDah: · -
In Braille the letter A is represented as ⠁ (in Unicode), the dot pattern:
Computing
In Unicode the capital A is codepoint U+0041 and the lowercase a is U+0061.
In Hex, A is the character used to represent decimal 10, or in binary, 01010
The ASCII code for capital A is 65 and for lowercase a is 97; or in binary 01000001 and 01100001, correspondingly.
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.
Meanings for A
- In biochemistry, A is the symbol for alanine and adenosine.
- In calendars, A is often an abbreviation for the months April and August.
- In computing,
- <a> is the HTML element for an anchor tag.
- In Windows, Ctrl-A, and Mac OS, Command-A, selects all the text in the document, or all the pixels of an image.
- A sometimes represents the set of all alphabetic characters within string patterns.
- A:\ is the conventional address of the first floppy disk drive in CP/M-based operating systems such as DOS.
- In education, a grade of A typically represents the highest score that students can achieve. (sometimes coupled with a plus/minus sign - i.e., A+ or A-, or a number - e.g., A1)
- In electronics,
- A is a standard size of battery.
- A refers to the Anode, or filament, component of a vacuum tube.
- In English, the word "a" is an indefinite article, see A, an
- In Esperanto, -a is the adjectival/attributive ending; A is commonly an abbreviation meaning English (language).
- In film, A is an Italian film made in 1969; see A (film).
- In finance, A is the U.S. ticker symbol for Agilent Technologies.
- In Greek, a- is a prefix (alpha privativum) meaning "not" or "devoid of", used in many borrowed words in English, German and Romance languages.
- In India A is movie rating, given to those intended to be seen only by adults.
- In international licence plate codes, A stands for Austria.
- In international paper sizes, A is a series of sizes with an aspect ratio of roughly 70% width to height, with A4 being an example popular size.
- In logic,
- the letter A is used as a symbol for the universal affirmative proposition in the general form "all x is y". The letters I, E and O are used respectively for the particular affirmative "some x is y", the universal negative "no x is y", and the particular negative "some x is not y". The use of these letters is generally derived from the vowels of the two Latin verbs affirmo (or AIo), "I assert", and nego, "I deny". The use of the symbols dates from the 13th century, though some authorities trace their origin to the Greek logicians.
- In symbolic logic, the symbol ∀ (an inverted letter A) is the universal quantifier.
- In mathematics,
- In medicine, A is one of the human blood types.
- In the SI system of units,
- In music,
- In nutrition, A is a vitamin.
- In a deck of playing cards, the letter A is used to mark each of the Aces.
- In photography, most SLR cameras use A to signify aperture priority mode, where the user sets the aperture and the camera determines the shutter speed.
- In political theory, a circumscribed "A" is an anarchist symbol.
- As the first letter of a postal code,
- In American Major League Baseball, the Oakland Athletics are often simply referred to as the "A's".
- As a timezone, A is the military designation for Coordinated Universal Time+1, also known as CET or Central European Time.
See also
Alpha, Cyrillic A, ª, À, Á, Â, Ã, Ä (Ae), Å (Aa), Æ, Ă Ą
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