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'Ā', lowercase 'ā', is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, is used in several orthographies.
In the Latvian alphabet, Ā represents a distinct vowel and comes after A and before B in alphabetical order: for instance ''baznīca'' comes before ''bārda'' in a Latvian dictionary. It is considered as a separate letter in the Latvian alphabet. Ā is used to denote a long A in Latvian.
In some languages Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Polynesian languages, including Māori, some romanizations of Japanese (rōmaji) and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong [eɪ] ([eː] in some dialects), and also in commercial names such as Drāno and Powerāde.
In Pinyin, Ā denotes A in the first tone of Mandarin Chinese.
In all these languages, Ā is sorted with other As 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'').

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Unicode

Unicode

In Unicode, Ā is code 256 (hex 100) and ā is code 257 (hex 101). These are the first codes that come after the initial ISO-8859-1 subset of Unicode.