A

A is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the open vowel /a/. Historically it is adopted from Phoenician aleph ('ox') by way of Greek alpha; the Greeks turned the Semitic consonant into a vowel. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter A the digit 1; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

The previous article traces the Latin A's sound and phonetic descent from Phoenician aleph. Its shape has its own separate history. Phoenician aleph was drawn as a stylised ox head, complete with two horns; the Greeks, who had no consonantal glottal stop to write, rotated the pictograph and read it as the vowel alpha, still recognisably horned in early Greek forms.

Etruscan scribes in central Italy adopted this alpha around the 7th century BCE and passed it to Rome largely unchanged in outline, and the capital A cut into Roman monumental inscriptions such as Trajan's Column (113 CE) already has the crossbar and two slanted strokes still used today. The lowercase a has a longer and stranger road: Roman cursive handwriting rounded the two strokes into a loop, producing by the early Middle Ages a two-story form with a small bowl beneath a curled top, the ancestor of the printed a still used in most typefaces. A different, single-story a, closer to the capital in outline, developed in parallel in medieval cursive and became the standard handwritten form; both shapes now coexist, one for print and one for handwriting and some typefaces, an unusual split not shared by most other Latin letters.