Why you should know: The ‘a’ vs ‘an’ conundrum is not about what letter actually begins the word, but instead about how the sound of the word starts.
For example, the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent, so you would say ‘an hour’ and not ‘a hour’. A trickier example is Ukraine: because the ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘You’, and in this case the ‘y’ is a consonant, you would say “a Ukraine” and not “an Ukraine”.
Tip: when in doubt, sound it out(loud).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
This is the general rule, but you’ll run into problems with words that are pronounced differently with different dialects.
Example:
A herb / An herb
I’d say ‘an herb’ because where I’m from, the h is silent.
But there are many places where it isn’t silent.
A bunch of other comments are using ‘history’ of an example of this… but I’ve not heard of a dialect where the h in history is silent.
Th’nk ofa som uk accents, lack’n the aytch, comin’ out 'istory & tha like
Well, that does count as a dialect, but I literally would not be able to comprehend it in person.
I have the PNW dialect, aka, the accent that is trained into every newcaster and hollywood actor, because basically every English speaker can understand it without difficulty.
The type O blood of English dialects, if you would.
Is that similar to Transatlantic speak? Transatlantic comes from pronunciation and pitch that carried well on poor radio signals preceeding the digital age. Meanwhile, I swear it was something in the MidAtlantic US that won most neutral English accent… Or most neutral American at the least.
That’s not a problem at all. Your example proves the rule: it’s about how the first letter sounds, not what the first letter is.
Agreed, it does prove the rule.
…but that doesn’t change what I said.
If you’re interacting soley through text, you may get into a/an arguments with people who don’t know that different dialects pronounce the same words differently.
I didn’t say ‘this disproves the rule.’