For whatever reason (probably because I couldn’t recall seeing this word in an American context) I’d assumed that this was confined to the British side of the pond and the countries of the Commonwealth. I’ve just come across it however in one of those 50s American comics I’m still ploughing through. Is it common in the US?

BTW knowing as I did that the term came from India it should have come as no surprise to find that the root word meant simply ‘belonging to Bengal’, but it did.

OED

[a. Hindustani banglā understood to be identical with the adj. of same form, meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’.]

Edited for correction (see posts below).

I think it’s less common now than it used to be but it was common enough USn usage when I was but a tad (mid-20th).  I associate it with a small single family house.

I too remember it from my youth (’50s-’60s) but haven’t heard it in a while.

Edit: I have posted about it on LH.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to say “aldi! aldi! aldi!”

BTW, aldi, did you change the italic a-macron in the OED etymology into an alpha manually, or was that some strange consequence of copy-and-paste?

Darn it, I knew it was foolhardy not to search!

As for the absence of a macron, unfortunately I could find no way of reproducing it. LH suggested this site or Character Map on Windows. I can’t find alpha macron on the site (it has only plain alpha and alpha with an oblique) and while switching to Arial Unicode MS font on Character Map does turn one up when I copy and paste I just get a question mark.

The code for the letter is U+1FB1 but I’m not sure how to enter that in a post. Does U signify that a particular key should be pressed before entering the hex code?

Small Greek letter alpha with macron can be entered at Wordorigins test forum by entering & followed by # followed by 8113 followed by semicolon. I cannot get &#1FB1; to work, which makes no sense to me.

Is this ᾱ what you are after?

For what its worth, the page source of droogie’s note has

producing this ᾱ

Excellent, that did the trick! I’ve amended the OP accordingly.

Here in So Cal, I see it used in real estate. We have both “beach bungalows” and “beach houses.” The bungalow designation means a very small house. There are many beach bungalows here that are not much more than free standing bedsit.

The thing is, in the OED entry that aldi is attempting to quote, it’s NOT an alpha-macron, it’s just an italicized a-macron.  The italicization, and the shrinkage to make room for the macron, make it look a bit like an alpha, but it isn’t one.  I can tell because when I copy-and-paste the etymology into text, the word in question comes out “bangl{amac}”; if the last character were an alpha-macron it would paste as “bangl{gamac}”.  You can see an alpha-macron in the citation for sense 1e of “distraction”.

Besides, what would an alpha be doing in an English transliteration of a Hindustani word?

I see! Thank you, Doc. And, since I’ve finally figured out how to enter the Unicode I’ll amend the OP once more, this time correctly. (The code for amac is U +0101, the U meaning Upper Case, the numbers being entered by the numeric keypad, or on a laptop without one, holding the Fn key down, and pressing the letter keys with small numbers at the bottom, remembering in this instance to press Caps Shift or Caps Lock as well. However, for whatever bizarre reason, my laptop produces it with simply U +0 .)

The U in those codes stands for Unicode. It’s funny that the site software seems to strip out the forms which use hexadecimal digits, but not the ones using decimal.

You’re quite right, jheem. I’ll get the hang of these damn codes eventually!