Definition: 'An'

Statistics

• Length: 2 characters
• Syllables: 1

Usage Notes

• Indefinite Article- used with singular nouns
• We use 'A' before a word beginning with a consonant sound
• We use 'AN' before a word beginning with a vowel sound
• We rarely use 'ONE' before a singular countable noun, unless we are counting

Grammatical Information

• Determiner
• Articles, Demonstratives, Possessives, Quantifiers and Numbers can be used as Determiners
• Determiners restrict a noun, by making it specific, indicating ownership or number, etc
• Used before a singular countable noun
• We don't use indefinite articles when a noun is behaving in an uncountable way

Lexical Information

• One of the 220 words in the Dolch high frequency list
• In the top 2,000 words in the Brown Corpus
• Common word- this is one of the thousand words most frequently used in English.
• A list of about 3,000 words defined as easy for the Dale-Chall Readability Formula