A and an are different forms of the indefinite article. Words where the “h” sound is pronounced, such as “hat,” “hotel,” or “hard,” use “a” instead of “an.”
However, authorities disagree on whether “historical” should be preceded by “a” or “an.” Many dictionaries encourage you to use the indefinite article that suits your pronunciation (depending on whether you pronounce the “h” sound at the start of the word).
Our team helps students graduate by offering:
Scribbr specializes in editing study-related documents. We proofread:
Scribbr’s Plagiarism Checker is powered by elements of Turnitin’s Similarity Checker, namely the plagiarism detection software and the Internet Archive and Premium Scholarly Publications content databases.
The add-on AI detector is powered by Scribbr’s proprietary software.
The Scribbr Citation Generator is developed using the open-source Citation Style Language (CSL) project and Frank Bennett’s citeproc-js. It’s the same technology used by dozens of other popular citation tools, including Mendeley and Zotero.
You can find all the citation styles and locales used in the Scribbr Citation Generator in our publicly accessible repository on Github.
