It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel /ä/, halfway between the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "cat" and "father".

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was азъ (azǔ), meaning the letter "I".

Throughout history, the Cyrillic letter А has had various shapes, but today is standardised on one that looks exactly like the Latin letter A, including the italic and lower case forms.

In most languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet – such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegrin – the Cyrillic letter А represents the open central unrounded vowel /a/.

In Tuvan the letter can be written as a double vowel.