Ā

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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 alphabetical order: for instance baznīca comes before bārda in a Latvian dictionary. It is considered as a separate letter in the Latvian alphabet. Ā is used to denote a long A in Latvian.

In some languages Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Polynesian languages, including Māori, some romanizations of Japanese (rōmaji) and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong [eɪ] ([eː] in some dialects), 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.