YSK: Use ‘a’ when the word starts with a consonant sound, and ‘an’ when it starts with a vowel sound
YSK: Use ‘a’ when the word starts with a consonant sound, and ‘an’ when it starts with a vowel sound
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.
You're viewing a single thread.
yeah this was kinda confusing when I was a kid because I was told that it was 100% about what letter starts a word. like an S for example. an... S...
didn't help that my mom would argue that it would be "a S" instead of an, even though an always felt more correct .
Kids are frequently taught that letters are vowels (or consonants) when it’s actually the sounds they represent, and there’s not a 1:1 mapping between letters and sounds.
It gets even more (or maybe less?) confusing when you realize that the word for the letter S is ess.