A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO

basic Latin
alphabet. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by
a horizontal bar. The lowercase 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, and is also found in italic type. In the English grammar, "a", and its variant "an", are
indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician
alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants . In turn, the ancestor 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. When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for a
letter to represent the glottal stop—the consonant sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and
other Semitic languages, and that was the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation.