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I, too, use "a" before history, and I would suppose that that's standard usage.
But what about honor? Since the "h" isn't pronounced, I always use "an".
"It's a honor..." just doesn't seem to work, which is why I said before that
article use has more to do with the way a word or acronym is pronunced, rather
than how it's spelled.
I looked in my style guide for info about this--I couldn't find any. But I'm
betting that in places where "history" is pronounced "`istory", "an `istory"
is perfectly acceptable.
Nora
merhar -at- alena -dot- switch -dot- rockwell -dot- com
