aaaa.

n.  a baby’s babble.  Babies between eight and twelve months “tend to chain their vowel sounds: aaaa, aa, aaaa” (Tara Losquadro Liddle, Why Motor Skills Matter: Improving Your Child’s Physical Development to Enhance Learning and Self-Esteem).

<“You’re forty minutes old,” the father says, “and crying already?”  “Aaaa,” says the baby.  —Annie Dillard, For the Time Being.> <[E]verybody’s first words in this world are, “Please save me!  Aaaa, please save me!”  —Seung Sahn, The Compass of Zen.>

n.  the sound of French words shouted by thousands of troops, as in War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.


n.  the sound of someone singing the letter a; see also aaa.

<Behind her she hears a woman beginning to sing classical vocals, a single vowel, aaaa, raised and lowered, broken into syllables, pulled out in a single, shivering note.  —Chitra Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams: A Novel.>

aaaa-ya.

interj.  a sound of disgust.

<Aaaa-ya!  How can you use such sickening language?  —David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly.>

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