Å is a small village and a parish in Norrköping Municipality

Norrköping Municipality

Norrköping Municipality is a municipality in Östergötland County in southeast Sweden. Its seat is located in the city of Norrköping, with some 90,000 inhabitants....

, Östergötland County

Östergötland County

Östergötland County is a county or län in southeastern Sweden. It borders the counties of Kalmar to the southeast, Jönköping to the southwest, Västra Götaland to the west, Örebro to the northwest, Södermanland to the northeast, and the Baltic Sea to the east.Östergötland County has a population of...

, Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

. It has a population of about 200.

There are also at least 12 other places in Sweden called Å

Å

Å represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...

, most of them only a farm

Farm

A farm is an area of land, or, for aquaculture, lake, river or sea, including various structures, devoted primarily to the practice of producing and managing food , fibres and, increasingly, fuel. It is the basic production facility in food production. Farms may be owned and operated by a single...

 or a few houses. Å is pronounced "Aw", or phonetically [o:].

Å, which means stream

Stream

A stream is a body of water with a current, confined within a bed and stream banks. Depending on its locale or certain characteristics, a stream may be referred to as a branch, brook, beck, burn, creek, "crick", gill , kill, lick, rill, river, syke, bayou, rivulet, streamage, wash, run or...

or small river, is a contender for the title of shortest place-name in the world — although other places named Å as well as Ö and Y

Y, Somme

Y is a commune in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France.The name is pronounced like the letter E in English. It bears the shortest place name in France, and one of the shortest in the world...

 can make the same claim. As a consequence, many tourists have ventured to the village for the sole purpose of either taking photos of or stealing the place-name sign

Street sign theft

Street sign theft occurs when street signs are stolen, often to be used as decorations, but also sometimes to avoid obeying the law by claiming later the sign was not there. Although the theft often seems arbitrary, signs that are unusual or amusing tend to be stolen more frequently...

.

The parish of Å is rich in ancient remains, of which the oldest date from the Stone Age

Stone Age

The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...

.