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.
I think the difficulty people have is when writing English down. In speech they will generally get this stuff right automatically, but when it’s on paper “a
historyhonour” can easily look right even though it’s not.EDIT - I am dumb.
How is “a history” not correct? The h is not silent.
You’re right, I’ve made an utter arse of that, ha ha! I meant to type “honour”.
