Ā

Ā, lowercase ā ("A with macron"), is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, used in several orthographies. Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Baltic languages (e.g. Latvian), Polynesian languages, including Māori and Moriori, some romanizations of Japanese, Persian, Pashto, Aten (which represents a long A sound), Arabic, Hebrew, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). In Romanised Mandarin Chinese (pinyin) it is used to represent A spoken with a level high tone (first tone). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong /eɪ/ (see Vowel length § Traditional long and short vowels in English orthography).

Writing systemLatin script

Typealphabetic

Sound values

• [a]
• [aː]
• [æ]
• [ɑ]
• [e^ɪ]
• [á]

InUnicodeU+0100, U+0101

Quick facts A with macron, Usage ...

A with macron
Ā ā
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	alphabetic
Sound values	[a] [aː] [æ] [ɑ] [eɪ] [á]
In Unicode	U+0100, U+0101
History
Development	Α α 𐌀 A a Ā ā
Transliterations	आ, آ, 𑆄
Other
Writing direction	left to right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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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 languages other than Sanskrit and related South Asian languages,^[1] Ā is sorted with other A's 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).