The Syntaxis Blog
A or An? Abbreviations and Articles
In business writing, questions abound regarding which article to use—a or an—with abbreviations such as SEC, NASD, and FBI. These are all examples of initialisms, which are abbreviations read as a series of letters. (A quick comment on terminology: in business, initialisms are commonly referred to as acronyms, but acronyms, though similar-looking, are pronounced as words. Acronym examples include NATO and NASA.) Initialisms are in fact the abbreviations responsible for countless a-versus-an battles in offices throughout the United States.
For example, which of the following sentences is correct?
1. I attended an SEC conference.
2. I attended a SEC conference.
If you picked the first sentence, that is correct! Yes, SEC does begin with a consonant, so one might think it should be preceded by the article a. However, what determines article choice is not the first letter of the initialism, but rather, the first sound you hear as you say it aloud. SEC is pronounced ess ee see, so the first sound is a short vowel sound, e. The correct article choice, therefore, is an.
If you spelled out the organization’s name as in the following sentence, the article choice would change:
I attended a Securities and Exchange Commission conference.
Here is one final example, using the full formal name of the SEC as displayed on its home page:
I attended a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission conference.
Even though the organization’s name begins with the vowel u, the country is actually pronounced yoo ess. Because the first sound you hear is the consonant y, the correct article choice is a rather than an.