Enclosed A or circled Latin A is a typographical symbol

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

. It is an "A

A

A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...

" within a circle

Circle

A circle is a simple shape of Euclidean geometry consisting of those points in a plane that are a given distance from a given point, the centre. The distance between any of the points and the centre is called the radius....

, and it occurs alongside many other enclosed alphanumerics.

Uses

An A within a circle was adopted as a symbol by the United States Third Army (now the United States Army Central

United States Army Central

United States Army Central is an Army Service Component Command of the United States Army and is also dual-hatted as the "United States Third Army". It is the Army Component of U.S...

) in the early 20th century.

Anarchism

Nowadays, the symbol might be most recognised as an icon used by many people who identify or sympathize with anarchism

Anarchism

Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...

. 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

Peter Marshall (author)

Peter Marshall is an English philosopher, historian, biographer, travel writer and poet. He has written fifteen books which are being translated into fourteen different languages. He wrote, presented and partly filmed the 6-part HTV series 'Voyage Around Africa', first shown in 1994...

 an author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, philosopher and BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 television producer

Television producer

The primary role of a television Producer is to allow all aspects of video production, ranging from show idea development and cast hiring to shoot supervision and fact-checking...

 wrote that it represented the idea (as advanced by Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin

Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...

 and other anarchist theorists) that "Anarchy is Order"; early incarnations of the anarchist icon were expressed with an unenclosed A

A

A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...

 (Anarchy) superimposed over the O

O

O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...

 (Order) before evolving into the more formal form used modernly.

Encodings

• The capitalized symbol can be generated with the unicode
  Unicode
  Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
  
   encoding "U+24B6" and the UTF-8
  UTF-8
  UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
  
   (hex.) encoding, "e2 92 b6".
• The lower case symbol can be generated with the unicode
  Unicode
  Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
  
   encoding "U+24D0" and the UTF-8
  UTF-8
  UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
  
   (hex.) encoding "e2 93 90".

See also

• Anarchist symbolism — Circle-A
• Anarchist symbolism — Black Flag
• United States Army Central
  United States Army Central
  United States Army Central is an Army Service Component Command of the United States Army and is also dual-hatted as the "United States Third Army". It is the Army Component of U.S...