Legal Writing

Why "an historic" is wrong

By Pam_Nelson

I ran across a story that used "an historic" and gathered other evidence to show how pervasive this error is in print. This post is about why the article should be "a," not "an." I'll save the "historic" vs. "historical" issue for another post.

The rule in English is "Use a before a consonant sound; use an before a vowel sound." That is about as straightforward as rules of English get. But the letter h gives people fits, apparently.  Some words that begin with h have a consonant sound -- what our third-grade teacher called a hard sound -- and some words that begin with h have a vowel sound -- the teacher called that silent. Examples of the silent h are "hour" and "honor."

The h in "history," "historic" and "historical" is pronounced; those words begin with a consonant sound. Therefore we use "a," not "an," as the article before the words. Most people don't mess up "history"; I don't think I have ever seen "an history." But we writers and editors mess up "historic" often. In a narrow (only the past year) archive search, which pulled from The N&O, the Charlotte Observer and other McClatchy newspapers in North Carolina and South Carolina, I found nine instances of "an historic." I spent less than 15 minutes checking my results. More stories turned up in my search.

Many years ago, a copy desk colleague set up save strings on the computer to help her fix recurring problems in copy. That was not a great way to edit, but it was a decent tool to use. I think many of us could use such a device to correct "an historic" to "a historic."

Full post as published by Triangle Grammar Guide on February 22, 2010 (boomark / email).