A large share of the Sanskrit verbal prefixes begin with this letter, and they are among the busiest elements in the language. One turns a verb forward or outward and forms an immense class of derived stems; another means around or on all sides and produces the vocabulary of completeness and encirclement; a third means back or against and gives the words for reply, reflection and opposition. A Sanskrit dictionary devotes a very large number of its pages to verbs with these prefixes attached, and the same elements are productive in the Prakrit of the inscriptions.
The letter also stands at the head of a family of words meaning protector, lord and guardian, which recur constantly in royal titles and in the naming of deities, so it is frequent in exactly the material that survives in stone. Titles are one of the most durable parts of an epigraphic corpus, because a proclamation names its author and a donative record names its donor.
Because it is common and because its Brahmi shape is a simple open form, the letter is a good one for a palaeographer to work with. It appears in every period and in every regional hand, and the later scripts elaborated its form rather than replacing it, so the ancestor is still visible in a number of modern Indic alphabets to a reader who has been shown where to look.