U00E3

U+00E3 is the Unicode code point for the Latin small letter a with tilde, written as ã. It belongs to the Latin-1 Supplement block, which consists of characters from U+0080 through U+00FF. The character ã is a Latin letter of the Latin alphabet, and it is written in many languages such as Portuguese, Galician, Malay, and Indonesian. In Portuguese it represents a nasalized vowel, whereas in Galician it also indicates nasalization. The character is often used in European Portuguese orthography, where it appears in words such as manhã (morning) and pão (bread).

The code point U+00E3 is encoded in UTF‑8 as the byte sequence C3 A3 and in UTF‑16 as the single word 00E3. It is also present in ISO‑8859‑1 (Latin‑1) and Windows‑1252 byte encodings, where it occupies the position 0xE3. In many older character sets this byte is referred to as Æ in CP1252. ã has a graphical half‑width counterpart as U+1E9C (Latin small letter a with tilde), though this is a distinct precomposed character used in phonetic transcription.

Historically, the tilde above the a in ã originated as a diacritic to indicate nasalization in the 16th and 17th centuries. The letter was introduced in Portuguese orthography in the early 18th century, and has remained a key element of the alphabet of several languages. It is commonly used in HTML as ã or ã. The character is also represented in music notation as a diacritic in certain Maltese and Spanish singing contexts, indicating a specific vowel quality.