Hasty Briefsbeta

Bilingual

English: A vs. An

5 hours ago
  • The rule for using 'a' versus 'an' depends on the spoken word's initial sound, not the written letter.
  • Examples: 'a unicorn' (starts with a consonant Y sound) and 'an hour' (starts with a vowel OW sound).
  • The author investigated how often these exceptions occur in a list of 32,455 words.
  • Only 129 words in the list required exceptions to the standard rule.
  • The author spent a day analyzing data and building visualizations for the findings.
  • The author notes that in hindsight, using LLMs could have saved time on code, but the code was one-off and correct.