A historic event or an historic event? People often believe that
they should use the indefinite article an in front of words like
historic, horrific, or hotel. Are they right or wrong? Should
you say ‘an historic event’ or ‘a historic event’? An is the
form of the indefinite article that is used before a spoken
vowel sound: it doesn’t matter how the written word in question
is actually spelled. So, we say ‘an honour’, ‘an hour’, or ‘an
heir’, for example, because the initial letter ‘h’ in all three
words is not actually pronounced. By contrast we say ‘a hair’ or
‘a horse’ because, in these cases, the ‘h’ is pronounced. Let’s
go back to those three words that tend to cause problems:
historic, horrific, and hotel. If hotel was pronounced without
its initial letter ‘h’ (i.e. as if it were spelled ‘otel’), then
it would be correct to use an in front of it. The same is true
of historic and horrific. If horrific was pronounced ‘orrific’
and historic was pronounced ‘istoric’ then it would be
appropriate to refer to