If you’ve ever sat down to design a typeface, you already know the dirty secret of type design: everything starts with “a.” Not because it’s the first letter of the alphabet — that’s almost a coincidence — but because “a” is one of the hardest, most revealing letters in the entire Latin alphabet. Get “a” right, and the rest of your lowercase set tends to fall into place. Get it wrong, and no amount of kerning will save you.

This is the first entry in a series where we’re going to walk through every glyph a font needs — lowercase, uppercase, punctuation, and multilingual characters — one at a time. We’re starting here, with the letter that terrifies type designers most.

A Short History of “a”

The letter “a” has one of the longest, strangest journeys of any character we use today. It traces back to a Phoenician letter called aleph, which meant “ox,” and if you tilt your head and squint at the old Phoenician glyph, you can sort of see two horns above a triangular face. When the Greeks adopted it, they flipped it around and renamed it alpha — and that’s where our word “alphabet” comes from, alpha plus beta.

By the time it reached Rome, “a” had settled into something close to the capital “A” we recognize now: two diagonal strokes meeting at a peak, joined by a crossbar. That’s the uppercase story. Lowercase “a” took a completely different road. It didn’t really exist yet — Roman inscriptions were all capitals. The rounded, single-story lowercase “a” we associate with handwriting emerged much later, during the medieval period, as scribes writing quickly with a pen naturally rounded out the letter’s sharp angles into a bowl shape.

Then something interesting happened during the Carolingian Renaissance, around the 8th and 9th centuries. Scribes under Charlemagne standardized a clear, legible minuscule script, and the two-story “a” — the one with a bowl and a little hook or “ear” on top — became the dominant form. That two-story “a” is the one you’re reading right now in this sentence. It survived the invention of movable type in the 15th century and became the default in most serif and sans-serif fonts ever since.

Anatomy of a Lowercase “a”

Type designers talk about letters almost like anatomists talk about bodies, and “a” has more named parts than you’d expect for such a small shape.

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Most lowercase a’s in print are what’s called double-story (or two-story): they have a bowl at the bottom and a smaller loop or arch on top, connected by a short vertical stem. The bottom bowl is the rounded enclosed part. The upper portion often includes a small curved stroke called the ear, which sits at the top right in some designs. There’s also the spine — the curved backbone that gives the letter its S-like flow when you trace it from top to bottom.

Then there’s the single-story a, the simpler circle-with-a-tail shape that’s closer to handwriting — the kind kids are taught to write first. You’ll see this version in many geometric sans-serifs and in most casual, handwriting-style, or signature fonts.

The choice between single-story and double-story isn’t just aesthetic. Double-story a’s are generally considered more legible in long passages of body text because the shape is more distinct from other letters like “o” or “e.” Single-story a’s feel friendlier and more casual, which is exactly why they show up so often in script and handwriting fonts — they mimic the natural, unfussy way people actually write by hand.

Designing the Letter From Scratch

If you’re building a typeface and you sit down to draw “a” first, here’s roughly what that process looks like.

You start with the bowl, because it sets the letter’s basic width and weight. Too wide, and the letter feels bloated; too narrow, and it starts to look like a lowercase “o” that got into an accident. Designers usually draw the bowl slightly overshooting the baseline and x-height — rounded shapes need to poke a hair beyond the straight guidelines, or they look optically smaller than the straight-sided letters around them. This is called overshoot, and it’s one of those invisible tricks that makes text look evenly weighted even though the actual measurements aren’t identical.

Next comes the spine and the top arch, if you’re doing a double-story design. This is the fussiest part. The curve has to flow naturally out of the bowl without creating an awkward pinch point where the two strokes meet — that junction is one of the most scrutinized spots in the whole letter. Too tight, and ink (digital or physical) clogs up at small sizes. Too loose, and the letter looks disconnected, like two separate shapes taped together.

Then the designer checks how “a” behaves next to other letters. Since it’s often used as a reference letter for setting the rhythm of the whole lowercase set, “a” typically gets drawn early, then revisited constantly as “n,” “o,” “e,” and others get built around it, making sure stroke weights, contrast, and overall texture stay consistent.

Unique Facts About “a”

A few things worth knowing: “a” is the most frequently used letter in the English language, edging out “e” in some counts depending on the corpus, though it’s close. In most Latin-based multilingual fonts, “a” also needs to support a surprising number of diacritic variants — á, à, â, ä, ã, å, ą — each requiring careful placement so the accent doesn’t collide with ascenders in the line above.

The single-story vs. double-story split isn’t universal, either. Some entire writing systems and font families have committed hard to one form: Futura, famously, uses a nearly geometric single-story “a,” while most classic serif families lean double-story almost without exception.

“a” in Popular Fonts

Look at Times New Roman or Garamond and you’ll see a textbook double-story “a,” with a pronounced ear and calligraphic stress. Helvetica also uses a double-story form, but flattened and more mechanical. Futura and Century Gothic go single-story, giving them that friendly, almost stencil-like geometric feel. In script and handwriting-style fonts — the territory a lot of font shops live in — single-story a’s dominate, since they echo real cursive movement and feel warmer and more personal on things like wedding invitations or branding.

Summary

The lowercase “a” carries more design history in its curves than almost any other letter — from an ox’s head in Phoenician script, through Roman capitals, into the rounded medieval minuscule, and finally into the double-story and single-story forms we choose between today. For type designers, it’s often the first letter drawn and the last one perfected, because it sets the tone for everything that follows in a typeface. Next up in this series: lowercase “b” — the letter that quietly borrows more from “a” than you’d think.

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