Ā

For A. E. van Vogt's novel, see The World of Null-A.

Ā, lowercase ā, is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, is used in several orthographies.

In the Latvian alphabet, Ā represents a distinct vowel and comes after A and before B in alphabet. It is considered as a separate letter in the Latvian alphabet. Ā is used to denote a long A ([aː]) in Latvian. In alphabetical order it is ordered equal with A.

In some languages Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Baltic languages, including Latvian, Samogitian, and Polynesian languages, including Māori, Chinese pinyin, some romanizations of Japanese (rōmaji), Persian, and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong /eɪ/, and also in commercial names such as Drāno and Powerāde.

In the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, Ā represents the open back unrounded vowel, आ, not to be confused with the similar Devanagari character for the mid central vowel, अ.

In all these languages, Ā is sorted with other As and is not considered a separate letter. The macron is only considered when sorting words that are otherwise identical. For example, in Māori, tāu (meaning your) comes after tau (meaning year), but before taumata (hill).

Unicode

In Unicode, Ā is code 256 (hex 100) and ā is code 257 (hex 101). These are the first codes that come after the initial ISO-8859-1 subset of Unicode.

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
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
Letter A with diacritics
Áá	Àà	Ăă	Ắắ	Ằằ	Ẵẵ	Ẳẳ	Ââ	Ấấ	Ầầ	Ẫẫ	Ẩẩ	Ǎǎ	Åå	Ǻǻ	Ää	Ǟǟ	Ãã	Ȧȧ	Ǡǡ	Ąą	Āā	Ảả	Ȁȁ	Ȃȃ	Ạạ
Ặặ	Ậậ	Ḁḁ	Ⱥⱥ	ᶏ	Ɐɐ	Ɑɑ
Letters using macron sign ( ◌̄ )
Āā	Ēē	Ḡḡ	Ī ī	Ōō	Ūū	Ȳȳ	Ǣǣ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646