- Ā
:"For A. E. van Vogt's novel, see
The World of Null-A ."Ā, lowercase ā, is a
grapheme , a LatinA with amacron , is used in several orthographies.In the
Latvian alphabet , Ā represents a distinctvowel 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, someromanization s of Japanese (rōmaji ) and Arabic, and someLatin 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 asDrāno and Powerāde.In
Pinyin , Ā denotes A in the first tone ofMandarin Chinese .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 initialISO-8859-1 subset of Unicode.
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