A

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 /a/, 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 letter has two minuscule (lower-case) forms. The form used in most current handwriting consists of a circle and vertical stoke ("ɑ"), called Latin alpha or "script a". Most printed material uses a form consisting of a small loop with an arc over it ("a"). 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.

In English, "a" by itself frequently 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/ as in ace and major, due to effects of the great vowel shift.

"A" is the third common used 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 turned "a" ("ɐ") is used by the International Phonetic Alphabet for the near-open central vowel, while a turned capital "A" ("∀") is used in predicate logic to specify universal quantification.

In Unicode the capital "A" is codepoint U+0043 and the lower case "a" is U+0067.

The EBCDIC code for capital "A" is 193 and for lowercase "a" is 129.

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