Please read the blog post naturally. It is available at https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2017/12/13/how-to-use-articles-another-look-1/. I think you may feel it easier to read the post there. Thank you!
How to use articles: another look (1)
By Liz Walter
Back in August 2015, I wrote a post about using articles – the words ‘a,’ ‘an’ and ‘the’. That post has had the most hits of any published on this site, so it is obviously an area that learners of English are interested in. You can read the post here:
https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2015/08/19/a-an-and-the-how-to-use-articles-in-english/.
If you are not sure about using articles, do go and read it, as it contains all the most important rules. However, looking back over it now, I’m struck by the number of interesting comments and queries, so in this post and the next one, I am going to follow up on some of these because I think (hope!) a lot of people will find the answers useful.
1) A or an? There seems to be confusion here between letters that are vowels or consonants and vowel or consonant sounds. We use ‘a’ in front of consonant sounds and ‘an’ in front of vowel sounds. So, for instance, someone asked whether to use ‘a’ or ‘an’ before the abbreviation ‘MBA’. The answer is ‘an’ because the sound of the first letter is /em/, so it begins with a vowel sound, even though the letter itself is a consonant.
Similarly, we use ‘a’ in front of a word such as ‘European’ because the initial sound /j/ is a consonant sound, even though the letter it starts with is a vowel.
2) A or one? There was a question about the difference between ‘There is a cat’ and ‘There is one cat’. The answer is that we would only say ‘one cat’ if the number of cats is important:
+ Tom has one cat and three dogs.
3) The + plural noun: One reader asked when to use ‘the’ with plural nouns. The rule is exactly the same as for ‘the’ with singular nouns: we use it when it is clear which things we are talking about, perhaps because we’ve already mentioned them or there is only one instance of them:
+ The oranges I bought were very juicy. (we are referring to specific oranges and the listener/reader knows which they are)
+ The stars are bright tonight. (there is only one set of stars in our sky so we know which stars are being talked about)
4) Pleasure or a pleasure? The question was about why we say e.g. ‘It was a great pleasure’, when ‘pleasure’ is uncountable. The answer is that in fact ‘pleasure’ – like many nouns – can be both countable and uncountable. In the dictionary on this site, such words have the label [C, U]. We would not usually use an article with the uncountable sense:
+ The emotion I felt was pleasure mixed with anxiety.
However, there is a wider and rather advanced point here, which is that many uncountable nouns can be used in a countable way in a somewhat literary or formal style if they are preceded by an adjective:
+ Her face showed a terrible sadness.
+ They displayed an ugly racism.
5) The cow = all cows? This is another advanced point. In rather formal situations, we can use ‘the’ + singular noun to refer to all things of that type:
+ The cow is a farm animal. (in less formal terms, we say: Cows are farm animals).
That’s more than enough for one post! Look out for my next post for some additional detailed information about articles.
