Enclosed A

Not to be confused with At sign (@).

"Circle-A" redirects here. For A overscribed on a circle, see the anarchy symbol.

The circle-A, commonly used as a symbol for anarchism.

Enclosed A or circled Latin A (Ⓐ, ⓐ) is a typographical symbol. It is an "A" within a circle, and it occurs alongside many other enclosed alphanumerics.

Uses

United States military

The shoulder sleeve insignia of the United States Third Army.

An A within a circle was adopted as a symbol by the United States Third Army (now the United States Army Central) in the early 20th century.

Anarchism

The symbol might be most recognized as an icon used by many people who identify or sympathize with anarchism. Despite the militaristic use noted above, by the dawn of the 21st century the enclosed A had largely supplanted the traditional Black Flag as the most-used symbol of that body of thought. Peter Marshall an author, philosopher and BBC television producer wrote that it represented the idea (as advanced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and other anarchist theorists) that "Anarchy is Order"; early incarnations of the anarchist icon were expressed with an unenclosed A (Anarchy) superimposed over the O (Order) before evolving into the more formal form used modernly.^[1]

Encodings

The symbols are encoded in Unicode at

U+24B6 Ⓐ circled latin capital letter a (HTML Ⓐ · UTF-8 encoding: e2 92 b6)
U+24D0 ⓐ circled latin small letter a (HTML ⓐ · UTF-8 encoding: e2 93 90).

References

↑ Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible. Fontana, London. 1993. p. 558

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Circle-A symbols.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Amero.