Red Blob Games explores English article rules: a vs. an
Developer analyzes when to use 'a' or 'an' based on sound, not spelling, finding 129 exceptions in 32,455 words.
What to know
- English article choice ('a' vs. 'an') is determined by the initial *sound* of the following word, not its spelling—'a unicorn' (Y sound) vs. 'an hour' (OW sound).
- Analysis of 32,455 words revealed only 129 exceptions (0.4%) to a simple vowel-letter check, suggesting pronunciation-based rules are highly consistent.
- The post gained substantial engagement on Hacker News, with community discussion around the linguistic analysis and procedural text generation applications.
azhenley Developer, Red Blob Games author
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Renewed discussion on Hacker News
The post resurged on Hacker News with higher engagement, reaching 55 points and 26 comments, indicating sustained community interest.
“The actual rule is not whether the written word starts with a vowel letter, but whether the spoken word starts with a vowel sound.”
— azhenley, Blog author · source -
This is one of the examples where English is perfectly consistent.edit: OK, the ("a") "nvidia employee" seems to provide a counterexample, but is it really about names? I think it's about repetition, "an Nvidia employee" just sounds strange due to the "en-en".But yeah, maybe it is a rare exception, because "an n-gram" is probably standard.I'm…
2 more of the top 3 · 71 posts in this stretch
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English: A vs. An L: https://www. redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09- 16-english-a-vs-an/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9769944 posted on 2026.09.19 at 16:41:26 (c=0, p=3)
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The other way around, Spanish uses the definite article where English would not:• Tengo los ojos azules -> I have blue eyes (not I have the blue eyes)• Juego el tenis -> I play tennis (not I play the tennis)Though as with the indefinite article, at least there is no discrepancy between single/plural. In part it is necessary because there are some…
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- 1 day quiet
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Post gains traction on Hacker News
The article reached Hacker News front page with initial engagement, accumulating 12 points and 4 comments.
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background
Analysis finds 129 exceptions among 32,455 words — The author conducted a data analysis of exception cases, discovering that only 0.4% of words in the dataset required exceptions to a simple vowel-letter check, and documented patterns with visualizations.
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background
Red Blob Games publishes analysis of 'a' vs. 'an' rule — Developer azhenley published a detailed blog post exploring when to use the indefinite articles 'a' and 'an' in English, building a function to determine correct article usage based on pronunciation rather than spelling.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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2 outlets English: A vs. An
first by HN Best, 4d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 21 voices from 2 sites · best of 71 · verbatim
- Sep 21
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A quirky story about A vs. An.When I was in third grade started learning english (I'm Swedish). One day our teacher was aiming to teach us when to use a vs. an.I came home and showed my mother what I had done during the day, and I had copied the drawing the teacher had done on the blackboard that basically stated that "A" was used for singular and…
- Sep 20
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Perhaps relevant to this audience: NetHack has a routine specifically for this.https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/src/objn...I think I agree with the comment in NH5 that some of the new cases "probably shouldn't be handled here", and think maybe NH3.4.3's simpler version should've been fine for NetHack's purposes:
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I always thought that "some" was technically an article (the plural form of "a"/"an") but I hadn't considered how plurals weren't used in phrases like that.One thing I did notice about strangeness in English articles is how British English seems to use definite articles in places where American English uses indefinite ones. Back when reading…
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English: A vs. An: https://www. redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09- 16-english-a-vs-an/ Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9769944
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> But then I realized, when you say the same sentence in plural - "they are doctors" - you don't have an article. You don't say "they are some doctors" (I had to Google, apparently "some" isn't an article anyway?)That's just a historical quirk of the terminology. A(n) and the were named articles for no particular reason.They belong to a much…
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The A becomes An for the same reason as the linking R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_RAs a non-native now living in UK I noticed this R sound in some accents. Someone said 'Java (r)Options' which when I asked they didn't even realise they were adding it. Both this R and N in an seem to be used break the continuity of vowels…
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In spanish you also have to use a/an:Es un perro (its a dog)Saying "es perro" makes no sense.The problem is that you are mixing two different constructs, if you are refering to the whole thing you have to say un/una, if you are describing a property of something you don't use it.Es un perro, es macho. (It's a dog, is male)If you are talking about…
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English would work for titles:He is President.He is Doctor. (Dr.)"He is president" is different than "he is a president" (one among many) or "he is the president" (the one specific).But it would have to be within the context of titlesWith the specific case, the "the" could be dropped - "who is in running this rpg?" points "he is gamesmaster" which…
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Interesting analysis> [LLM It doesn’t need to be clean or maintainable. It only needs to be correctBut correctness is precisely the issue with LLMs?But also> I would’ve spent more time on the trie simplification algorithm and less time on parsing cmudict and re-learning d3.js.]You could've spent nothing on D3 because the result is bad/poorly…
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You should not look at superficial similarities between languages, but at logic.To the question: "What is he?", the answer can be "He is married, tall, doctor in medicine".On another point of view, "He is a doctor" = "one in the set of the doctors". (But which one of the crowd there? The tall on is the doctor.)"He is doctor in medicine": identity…
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There’s an ongoing debate about whether articles are a proper part of speech; the only articles in English are the and a. Some grammarians prefer “determiner”, which includes a, the, some, other, no (as in “no man”) etc. A determiner is just a word that selects/determines an element of a larger assumed universe of discourse.Some grammarians deny…
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english is my second language, but I learned it early enough that I didn't have to study the rules (and it more or less replaced my mother tongue).Years later a friend who was learning english asked me the difference between "a" and "an" and I realised I had no idea. I know when to use each, but not the rule governing why.Fascinating how different…
- Sep 19
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Starting earlier today, I've been using Firefox's local translation feature to auto-translate every page to Italian (to learn). I just had to remove English from my language list and check an option to translate English to Italian.Firefox's local translation is pretty decent but not amazing. It did render this article's title as "Italiano: A vs…
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English: A vs. An Link: https://www. redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09- 16-english-a-vs-an/ Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9769944
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It's avoiding two distinct vowel sounds in succession.Consider other variations of this rule.In French, one would say "l'hôpital" rather than "le hôpital" because the 'h' is an aspirated breath (try saying "a aspirated" rather than "an aspirated") leading to an initial vowel sound.In Irish, the word for father is "athair". To say "her father" it…
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i think this post with more details would be a better link: https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/. The graph of exceptional cases is particularly interesting.(Besides, it clarifies the colour scheme — the red vs black went totally unnoticed to my colourblind eye.)
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It’s simply that, in English, there is no indefinite plural article — or, equivalently, that the indefinite plural article is null. So ‘they are doctors’ is consistent with the behaviour of plural nouns elsewhere.Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie…
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This reminds me of the multiple AI videos out there that I have to involuntarily listen to because people hate using earphones/headphones. They just start off like "The man/woman blah blah blah", and my poor brain is always noting that's bad English/grammar or whatever because What man/woman are you talking about? Where did he/she come from in…
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I always wondered if some uses of the word 'and' I notice on occasion might have similar explanations, or if they were the result of misspelling, mistyping, incorrect autocorrect, etc.. anyone know?Examples from published articles: "Barely half and hour was on the clock" "the hospital, which is in and area of central Homs" "spiraled into and armed…
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A funny quirk of English I never noticed until I started learning Spanish:In Spanish, to say for example, "he is a doctor," you would say "él es médico." Which more literally translates to "he is doctor," which feels unintuitive coming from English. Spanish DOES have an equivalent for "a" - "un/una", so the natural thing for an English speaker to…
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Fun fact an adder (snake) was once a nadder, and an apron was on a napron. This fun fact brought to you by The History of English Podcast.https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/Happily sourced in Wikipedia so I don't have to figure out which episode I learned that from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder <- see below the table in Taxonomy.