The name of the founder of Buddhism begins with this letter, and Buddhist donative inscriptions make up a very large share of the earliest Brahmi material there is. The railings at Sanchi and Bharhut, the western cave sites, the reliquary deposits and the pillar records name monks, nuns, lay donors and guilds giving to the community, and the vocabulary of that giving is repetitive enough that the letters in it are attested in thousands of examples. The word behind the name means awakened, a past participle of a root meaning to wake or to understand, and it is an ordinary Sanskrit adjective before it is a title.
The letter appears in ordinary vocabulary besides, in the root meaning to bind and its large family of derivatives, and in the words for strength and for the outside. Like every consonant it carries the inherent short a and joins a following consonant into a conjunct where no vowel comes between them.
One complication attends it throughout the epigraphic record. In many Middle Indo-Aryan dialects this letter and the labial semivowel fell together, so an inscription may write either where the Sanskrit form has only one, and the alternation is among the commonest notes in an epigraphic apparatus. Editors record the spelling they find rather than the one Sanskrit would require.