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A
The letter ‹A› is the first letter in the Latin alphabet.
Usage
In English, ‹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/ as in ace and major, due to effects of the great vowel shift.
In most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, ‹a› denotes an open central unrounded vowel (/a/).
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, variants of ‹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. 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› is often used to denote something or someone of a better or more prestigious quality or status: A, A+ or A*, the best grade that can be assigned by teachers for students' schoolwork; A grade for clean restaurants; A-List celebrities, etc. The number 1 is used in a similar way.
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 indicate universal quantification.
In Unicode the capital ‹A› is codepoint U+0041 and the lower case ‹a› is U+0061.
The ASCII code for capital ‹A› is 65 and for lower case ‹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 numeric character references in HTML and XML are "A" and "a" for upper and lower case, respectively.
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