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# a or an — by sound, not by letter

**Gist.** *A* stands before a word beginning with a consonant **sound**, *an* before a vowel sound. What matters is the pronunciation of the next word, not its first letter. **Conditions and exceptions.** *a unit, a European, a ewe, such a one* — initial sound [j] or [w]; *an hour, an heir, an honest man, an honour* — silent *h*; letter names and abbreviations go by sound: *an MP, an FBI agent, a UN report*. Before an unstressed syllable with *h-*, the 19th-century British norm had *an historical novel, an hotel*; today *a historical* prevails. Archaisms: *an union, an universal, such an one*. Colloquial *a* before a vowel (*a apple*) is an error in the text. **Examples.** *a university*; *an hour*; *an X-ray*; *a history*, but old *an historian*. **In UD.** Lemma and features of *a* and *an* are identical, so the annotation does not record the choice of form: this is a check of the text, not of the annotation. Not formalizable in the v0 rule language — it needs word adjacency and pronunciation (e.g. CMUdict: en-cmudict). **Sources.** Poutsma GLME vol. 3, Ch. XXXI §3 with notes II–V (books/p/po/poutsma-1904-grammar-late-modern-english/text-3.md, pp. 535–536 = book pp. 515–516).

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