U+0041 · Latin Capital Letter A
Every story starts with A.
Four thousand years ago it was a drawing of an ox. Today it opens the alphabet, tops the report card, and leads millions of words in hundreds of languages. This is a short field guide to the first letter.
01 — The journey
From an ox head to the alphabet’s opening act.
c. 1800 BCE
Proto-Sinaitic ʾalp
Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt borrow hieroglyphs to write their own language. A drawing of an ox head — ʾalp, “ox” — stands for the glottal stop at the start of that word.
02 — Glyph lab
One letter, a thousand faces.
Type designers often start a new typeface with “a” — its bowl, stem and terminal set the tone for everything else. Try a few.
Typeface
03 — By the numbers
8.2%
of English letters
A is the third most common letter in English text, after E and T.
65
its ASCII code
Uppercase A is 0x41 in ASCII and Unicode; lowercase a is 97.
·−
in Morse code
One dot, one dash — among the shortest codes, a sign of how often A is sent.
1st
in nearly every alphabet
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic all begin with a descendant of aleph.
04 — Around the world
The same sound, many shapes.
A
Latin
a
Α
Greek
alpha
А
Cyrillic
a
א
Hebrew
aleph
ا
Arabic
alif
ア
Japanese
a