A LED or An LED?

[Nearholmer]

Interesting unless you are a ten year old working to a school curriculum that attempts to turn all this subtlety into a set of hard rules, then makes you learn them.

 

It's a great way to cause children to disengage from their English lessons. Just ask my son if you need confirmation.

[BWsTrains]

My rule of thumb is "does it flow?" when spoken.  "An LED" does, "A LED" does not, a pause is forced after the "A" in the latter.

 

I think this is called liaison, a technique the French are very good at using to ensure their spoken language flows.

 

Wikipedia helpfully offers "..it can be characterized functionally as a euphonic strategy for avoiding hiatus". Sounds painful but is actually the opposite.

 

Colin

[njee20]

Interesting unless you are a ten year old working to a school curriculum that attempts to turn all this subtlety into a set of hard rules, then makes you learn them.

 

It's a great way to cause children to disengage from their English lessons. Just ask my son if you need confirmation.

It's a difficult thing isn't it, because you do need rules to explain these things, there are just then lots of exceptions! I imagine even 10 year olds would subconsciously break the rules they're told are there.

 

Tell him to stick with it - I did an A-level in English Language and really enjoyed it, I'm only 30 so it wasn't all that long ago! It gets less prescriptive and more fun.

[RFS]

The letter "L" is not a vowel.

 

"A Led" is proper by any standard. You are not likely to say "An lead balloon".

 

Were you spelling the letters "L, E, D" then you might feel more comfortable with "An el ee dee". Personally I find that "A el ee dee" is not discordant. For an example like "LNER", you may prefer to say "An el en ee arr locomotive …"

 

You are confusing letters and sounds. We speak in sounds not letters. The l is not a vowel when it is used in a word. For example, "light". But the letter l is pronounced as a word as in "ell". Therefore it is right to say an LED. In the same way you would say the word "light" is spelt with an "l", not with a "l". 

[Sir TophamHatt]

Good reading here.

 

I think as I am getting older, I am getting more interested in why our language is like it is.

 

To make things slightly more interesting, the new OLED TVs coming out... is it Ohh-Lead (rhyming with dead) or Ohh-L.E.D?

Many adverts coin it as one word but I always thought it was two... like e-mail, which incidently has dropped the hyphen these days to be a singular word but we still pronounce it as two seperate parts. I mean, e-lephant or e-uphoria aren't right, yet e-mail is (why not Em-Mail? - American sounding!)

[njee20]

Interesting! I say O-L-E-D, but definitely open for interpretation, I know people who say "Oh-led".

I guess e-mail is still a hangover from it being an abbreviation of electronic mail, there is a precedent for other words with a similar structure still having a 'hard' e sound: enunciate, elongate etc, but perhaps in years to come folk will be saying 'em-ale'!

[sharris]

In O-Level German I didn't have too much trouble with the genders in isolation, but I couldn't, for the life of me, understand cases. I defy anyone but a small group of professional linguists to properly understand cases.

 

I never studied German, but I understand from a little googling that it has four cases.

 

I did study Latin to O level which had up to seven cases (Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative and sometimes Locative) in singular and plural, and classical Greek which had five cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative) but as well as singular and plural had dual specifically for two of something. 

 

Cases usually make sense to me as they describe the interaction of objects within the sentence, but knowing the gender of some arbitrary thing seems to me to be just a case of rote learning much of the time. I work with orthopaedic surgeons and bones have Latin names. Why, for example, should femur be neuter, tibia be feminine and humerus be masculine?

[sharris]

Interesting! I say O-L-E-D, but definitely open for interpretation, I know people who say "Oh-led".

I guess e-mail is still a hangover from it being an abbreviation of electronic mail, there is a precedent for other words with a similar structure still having a 'hard' e sound: enunciate, elongate etc, but perhaps in years to come folk will be saying 'em-ale'!

 

I'd say O-led, and for infra-red LEDs (IR-LEDs), I'd say I-R-led, (at the other end of the spectrum I'd say U-V-led for UV-LEDs, but I've never had cause to use one!), but without any abbreviated prefix I'd say L-E-D rather than led - e.g. L-E-D display, or red L-E-D.  Probably depends how much of a mouthful I think it is. 

[njee20]

Why is it that we say W-W-W instead of  "world wide web", we've taken a three syllable phrase and turned it into a nine-syllable initialism!

[28XX]

It’s always been “an ‘otel” in my father’s family. He pointed this out to my maternal grandfather, who promptly tried “An Hotel”, having been taught never to drop his aitches. The clash of culture and education between London and Manchester 55 years ago.

Edited July 19, 2018 by 28XX

[28XX]

Why is it that we say W-W-W instead of "world wide web", we've taken a three syllable phrase and turned it into a nine-syllable initialism!

That is also mutating. The www bit gets omitted more often than not, and modern browsers know what you mean if you do so. Until we colonise another planet, it’s really superfluous.

Edited July 19, 2018 by 28XX

[njee20]

It's actually the website, rather than the browser, but yes website.com will nearly always work exactly the same as www.website.com becuase people are lazy and why would you bother to type www?! Theoretically you could define the domain to redirect from wwwwwwww.website.com if you wanted too - the server will just have predefined rules on how it handles different URLs, with a "master" (canonical) domain, which the website owner can define (ie either with or without www).

 

In most browsers pressing ctrl+enter adds "www" and ".com" to whatever is in the address bar anyway, although not much use when you want a .co.uk site.

[stewartingram]

Why is it that we say W-W-W instead of  "world wide web", we've taken a three syllable phrase and turned it into a nine-syllable initialism!

 

I tend to say W-3 (as in 2 cubed), ie  W-cubed (how do you type that on here?).

 

Stewart

[Ozexpatriate]

You are confusing letters and sounds. We speak in sounds not letters. The l is not a vowel when it is used in a word.

I'm really not confused. "Led" is a proper word, whether it is the past tense of of the verb lead, or an acronym for light emitting diode.

[Ozexpatriate]

I tend to say W-3 (as in 2 cubed), ie  W-cubed (how do you type that on here?).

A lot of IT types will say "dub dub dub" but only where that context is meaningful, like when reciting a URL. (Not "an URL".)

Edited July 19, 2018 by Ozexpatriate

[njee20]

I tend to say W-3 (as in 2 cubed), ie  W-cubed (how do you type that on here?).

 

Stewart

W³!?

[Ozexpatriate]

To make things slightly more interesting, the new OLED TVs coming out... is it Ohh-Lead (rhyming with dead) or Ohh-L.E.D?

Many adverts coin it as one word but I always thought it was two... like e-mail, which incidently has dropped the hyphen these days to be a singular word but we still pronounce it as two seperate parts. I mean, e-lephant or e-uphoria aren't right, yet e-mail is (why not Em-Mail? - American sounding!)

Interesting! I say O-L-E-D, but definitely open for interpretation, I know people who say "Oh-led".

I guess e-mail is still a hangover from it being an abbreviation of electronic mail, there is a precedent for other words with a similar structure still having a 'hard' e sound: enunciate, elongate etc, but perhaps in years to come folk will be saying 'em-ale'!

I don't think any American would say emm-ale. Nor do I think this likely at any time in the near future. The French of course tried to enforce "courriel".

 

"Oh-led" is commonplace in US English, rather than "Oh el ee dee".

[Spitfire2865]

Why is it that we say W-W-W instead of  "world wide web", we've taken a three syllable phrase and turned it into a nine-syllable initialism!

Does anyone actually refer to it as "World Wide Web" anymore? I havent heard it referred to as such since the very early 2000s.

 

I don't think any American would say emm-ale. Nor do I think this likely at any time in the near future. The French of course tried to enforce "courriel".

 

"Oh-led" is commonplace in US English, rather than "Oh el ee dee".

Ive never heard it pronounced "Oh-led" over here.  

[Ozexpatriate]

Ive never heard it pronounced "Oh-led" over here.  

This was the first web hit for videos.

 

Pronunciations used:

 

"Queue-led" for QLED

"Oh-led" for OLED

"ell ee dee" for LED

"ell cee dee" for LCD

[Thunderforge]

As a bit of related useless information an Apron was, in the Middle Ages, actually a Napron. But the ‘n’ migrated!

[Ozexpatriate]

As a bit of related useless information an Apron was, in the Middle Ages, actually a Napron. But the ‘n’ migrated!

Fascinating.  L. mappa -> Fr. naperon -> napron -> apron, napkin and nappy (oh, and map)

Edited July 19, 2018 by Ozexpatriate

[Thunderforge]

Nice link Ozexpatriate, although I’d wondered what I’d clicked on when I saw the url!

[Thunderforge]

I use three letter references for file types at work; pdf, jpg, tiff, gif, eps, and so on. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to whether it’s a “jay pee jee” or a “jay peg” and it changes from person to person. For example I say “ee pee ess” but a colleague calls it an “epps”.

One I always remember kept referring to a pdf file as a “pee’d’f’file” to see how many times he could say it before anyone realised.

 

And on that note, who’s f’coffee?

[EddieB]

As a bit of related useless information an Apron was, in the Middle Ages, actually a Napron. But the ‘n’ migrated!

Ripley, in his notorious "Believe It Or Not", asserts that "an apple" was similarly and originally "a napple".

[sharris]

Ripley, in his notorious "Believe It Or Not", asserts that "an apple" was similarly and originally "a napple".

On the other hand it's a myth that an orange was originally a norange.

While its root is the Sanskrit 'naranga', it actually lost the N on its way through France when it became orenge as in 'pomme d'orenge' from Arabic naranj via Old Provençal auranja.