# A
**A** (lowercase **a**) is the first letter of the [English alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/english-alphabet), a vowel of the [Latin script](https://www.edgepedia.org/latin-script), and one of the most widely used letters in the world's writing systems. Its uppercase form is encoded in Unicode at U+0041 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A) and its lowercase at U+0061 (LATIN SMALL LETTER A), the canonical case pair for the letter.[1](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/A) • [2](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5.0?topic=tables-unicode-uppercase-lowercase-conversion-mapping-table)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Alphabet position | First letter of the English alphabet; a vowel[1](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/A) |
| Unicode code points | U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A; U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A (the case-mapping pair)[2](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5.0?topic=tables-unicode-uppercase-lowercase-conversion-mapping-table) |
| Origin | Phoenician aleph, drawn as a stylized ox head with two horns; the Greeks rotated the pictograph and read it as the vowel alpha[3](https://www.divinityatlas.com/articles/unnamed-a-as-a-graphic-form) |
| Date of alphabet's invention | Early second millennium BC, by Semitic speakers drawing on Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic writing[4](https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/alphabet) |
| Entry into Latin | The Latin alphabet was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC; the earliest known Latin inscriptions date from the 6th century BC[5](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm) |
| Grammatical use | The word "a" is the English indefinite article, used before consonant sounds, with "an" before vowel sounds[1](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/A) |
## Ancient ancestry
The letter A corresponds to the first symbol of the [Phoenician alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/phoenician-alphabet) and of almost all its descendants.[6](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/A) The alphabet itself was invented, on the current archaeological consensus, in the early part of the second millennium BC by Semitic speakers who drew on Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic writing; inscriptions discovered at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt added credence to this picture after decades of debate over earlier proposals.[4](https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/alphabet) [Proto-Sinaitic script](https://www.edgepedia.org/proto-sinaitic-script), invented about 4,000 years ago by Canaanite workers at an Egyptian turquoise mine in the Sinai, developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn inspired the early Hebrew, Greek, and Roman alphabets.[7](https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/what-was-the-first-alphabet-in-the-world)
Phoenician aleph was drawn as a stylized ox head, complete with two horns. Because Greek lacked a glottal stop consonant, speakers turned the pictograph on its side and gave it the value of the vowel alpha; in early Greek letterforms its horns could still be made out.[3](https://www.divinityatlas.com/articles/unnamed-a-as-a-graphic-form) From alpha the letter passed into the [Latin alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/latin-alphabet).
## Path into Latin
The Latin, or Roman, alphabet was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC to write Latin, and the earliest known inscriptions in it date from the 6th century BC.[5](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm) In the earliest Latin inscriptions, such as one found in the excavation of the [Roman Forum](https://www.edgepedia.org/roman-forum) in 1899 and another on a golden fibula found at Praeneste in 1886, the letters were still identical in form with those of the western Greeks.[6](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/A) As the Latin alphabet spread to other languages, accented forms of A multiplied into the precomposed characters of modern Unicode: À (U+00C0, with grave), Ā (U+0100, with macron, used in Latvian and in scholarly Latin), Ă (U+0102, with breve, in Romanian and Vietnamese), and Ą (U+0104, with ogonek, in Polish and Lithuanian), among many others.[8](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/0100/)
The lowercase a has its own separate history. It exists in two living shapes: the two-story printed a, and a different single-story a, closer to the capital in outline, that developed in parallel in medieval cursive and became the standard handwritten form. Today the two forms live on side by side, one serving print and the other handwriting and certain typefaces, a rare division that most other Latin letters do not exhibit.[3](https://www.divinityatlas.com/articles/unnamed-a-as-a-graphic-form)
## A in Unicode and computing
Beyond the basic pair U+0041/U+0061, the letter A appears across Unicode in dozens of styled and functional variants. The Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block provides a mathematical sans-serif capital A at U+1D5A0, one of a family of serif, sans-serif, bold, italic, and fraktur letterforms encoded for scientific notation.[9](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/1d400/) The Enclosed Alphanumerics block offers a circled capital A at U+24B6 and a parenthesized small a at U+249C.[10](https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2460.pdf) These separately encoded look-alike letters exist so that a styled letter can carry its own plain-text identity; a 2024 study of large language models found that non-standard Unicode alphanumeric symbols reduced the efficacy of guardrails implemented through reinforcement learning from human feedback, and recommended incorporating such text into model training data.[11](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14490)
## Uses beyond the alphabet
As a standalone word, "a" is the English indefinite article, used as a function word before singular nouns when the referent is unspecified ("a man walked by"); it is used before consonant sounds, with "an" before vowel sounds, though usage varies in speech and in the treatment of words beginning with h.[1](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/A) In music, A is the sixth tone of a C-major scale, and in medicine, blood group A is the one of the four ABO groups characterized by the presence of A antigens and of antibodies against the antigens present in the B blood group.[1](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/A)
## References
1. [A – Definition & Meaning, Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/A)
2. [Unicode uppercase to lowercase conversion mapping table, IBM](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5.0?topic=tables-unicode-uppercase-lowercase-conversion-mapping-table)
3. [A as a Graphic Form, Divinity Atlas](https://www.divinityatlas.com/articles/unnamed-a-as-a-graphic-form)
4. [Alphabet Origins: From Kipling to Sinai, The Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/alphabet)
5. [The Latin alphabet, Omniglot](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm)
6. [1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: A, Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/A)
7. [What was the first alphabet in the world? Live Science](https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/what-was-the-first-alphabet-in-the-world)
8. [Latin Extended-A – Unicode 18.0.0 character names list](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/0100/)
9. [Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols – Unicode 18.0.0 character names list](https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/nameslist/1d400/)
10. [Enclosed Alphanumerics, The Unicode Standard, Version 17.0](https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2460.pdf)
11. [Impact of Non-Standard Unicode Characters on Security and Comprehension in Large Language Models, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14490)
---
*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license