The Illuminated Letter "A"

Illuminated capital "A" includes a tiny snail.

Illuminated capital "A" includes the eternal flame lamp and birds.

Illuminated capital "A" includes flowers and ivy.

Illuminated capital "A" includes a court lady holding a fan.

Additional Illuminated letter "A"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.

A (named a /ˈeɪ/, plural aes^{[nb 1]}) is the 1st letter and the first vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The upper-case version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lower-case version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children. It is also found in italic type.

        The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet (which consisted entirely of consonants, thereby being an abjad rather than a true alphabet). In turn, the origin of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended.

A in other languages.

       In 1600 B.C.E., the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph.      

       When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for the glottal stop—the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation of the letter, and the sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages—so they used an adaptation of the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and gave it the similar name of alpha. In the earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark Ages, dating to the 8th century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the Greek alphabet of later times it generally resembles the modern capital letter, although many local varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at which the cross line is set.

A variety of glyphs of the
 lowercase letter A.

       The Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write the Latin language, and the resulting letter was preserved in the Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English.

       During Roman times, there were many variations on the letter "A". First was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other "permanent" mediums. For perishable surfaces, which were used for everyday or utilitarian purposes, a cursive style was used. Due to the "perishable" nature of the surfaces, examples of this style are not as common as those of the monumental. This perishable style was called cursive and numerous variations have survived, such as majuscule cursive, minuscule cursive, and semicursive minuscule. There were also variants intermediate between the monumental and the cursive. The known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial.
       At the end of the Roman Empire (5th century AD), several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. Among these were the semicursive minuscule of Italy, the Merovingian script in France, the Visigothic script in Spain, and the Insular or Anglo-Irish semi-uncial or Anglo-Saxon majuscule, of Great Britain. By the 9th century, the Caroline script, which was very similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making, before the advent of the printing press. This form was derived through a combining of prior forms. Read more . . .

• See more illuminated letter "A" at Color The Bible