Uppercase "A" Has Been Upside Down This Whole Time — Sort Of

 

Uppercase "A" Has Been Upside Down This Whole Time — Sort Of

We're kicking off a new chapter in our glyph series: uppercase letters, starting with "A." And it has one of the more surprising backstories in the whole alphabet.

"A" traces back to a Phoenician letter representing an ox's head, complete with two horns — but the earliest version was oriented completely differently from how we write it now, since Phoenician was written right to left. As the letter passed through Greek and eventually Latin, it flipped, rotated, and gradually abstracted into the two-diagonal, crossbar shape we recognize instantly today. Rotate a modern capital "A" 180 degrees, and you can still faintly see the ox-head imagery it descended from.

"A" also literally gave the alphabet its name — "alpha" plus "beta," the first two Greek letters, combined into "alphabet." It's held its core shape for roughly 2,500 years, making it one of the most visually stable letters in the entire Latin alphabet.

This glyph series breaks down every letter like this. ✍️ #TypeDesign #Typography #FontDesign

Read more: https://letterhanna.com/lowercase-letter-a-design-and-history/