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).

Reference

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  • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 hours ago

    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 history honour” can easily look right even though it’s not.

    EDIT - I am dumb.