A

This article is about the firstletterin theAlpha bet.For the indefinite article, seeArticle (grammar).For other uses, seeA (disambiguation).

TheLatin Alpha bet
	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj
Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv
	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

Writing "A" in cursive font.

Ais the first letter of theEnglishAlpha bet.The small letter,a,is used as a lowercasevowel.

When it is spoken, ā is said as a longa,adiphthongof ĕ and y. A is similar to Alpha of theGreek Alpha bet.That is not surprising, because it means the same sound.

"Alpha andOmega"(the last letter of the Greek Alpha bet) means from beginning to the end. Inmusical notation,the letter A is the symbol of a note in the scale, belowBand aboveG.

A is the letter that was used to represent a team in an oldTVshow,The A-Team.A capital a is written "A". Use a capital A at the start of a sentence if writing.

A is also a musical note, sometimes referred to as "La".

Where it came from

The letter 'A' was in the Phoenician Alpha bet'saleph.This symbol came from a simple picture of anoxhead.

Egyptian	Phoenician aleph	Greek Alpha	Etruscan A	Roman/Cyrillic A

This Phoenician letter helped make the basic blocks of later types of the letter. The Greeks later modified this letter and used it as their letterAlpha.The Greek Alpha bet was used by theEtruscansin northern Italy, and the Romans later modified the Etruscan Alpha bet for their own language.

Using the letter

The letter A has six different sounds. It can sound like æ, in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet,such as the wordpad.Other sounds of this letter are in the wordsfather,which developed into another sound, such as in the wordace.

Use in mathematics

In algebra, the letter "A" along with other letters at the beginning of the Alpha bet is used to represent known quantities.

In geometry, capital A, B, C etc. are used to labelline segments,lines,etc. Also, A is typically used as one of the letters to label an angle in a triangle.

Its letter shape is referred to abstractly in SirWilliam Vallance Douglas Hodge's 5thpostulate,the basis for, as one of theMillennium Prize Problems,theHodge Conjecture.