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Citation Information
How to Cite
Hendrickson, Robert. "A." Writer's Reference Center. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 18 Apr. 2025. <http://fofweb.infobase.com/wrc/Detail.aspx?iPin=DOAR03769>.
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A

Region
New England

Definition 
The capital letter adulterers were forced to wear as a badge when convicted of the crime of adultery under a law in force in New England from 1639 to 1785.

There was likewise a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children … Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread; so that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Endicott and the Red Cross," 1838)

Hawthorne, of course, also wrote about the A of adultery in his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). See also Scarlet Letter The.

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