In the earliest Greek inscriptions dating to the 8th century BC following the Greek Dark Ages, the letter rests upon its side. Its name in most other languages matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. Learn a new word every day. In the King James Version of the Old Testament and occasionally in writing and speech an is used before h in a stressed syllable. Before unstressed or weakly stressed syllables with initial h both a and an are used in writing.
15th-century Italy saw the formation of the two main variants that are known today. By the ninth century, the Caroline script, which was very similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making, before the advent of the printing press. There was also a cursive style used for everyday or utilitarian writing, which was done on more perishable surfaces.
A is the letter that was used to represent a team in an old TV show, The A-Team. In musical notation, the letter A is the symbol of a note in the scale, below B and above G. That is not surprising, because it means the same sound. To add A, a to a word list please sign up or log in. There are also precomposed character encodings for ⟨A⟩ and ⟨a⟩ with diacritics, for most of those listed above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics. The double ⟨aa⟩ sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark.
