Wordnerdery

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Is it 'an apron' or 'a napron'?

Apron, obviously. But did you know that it used to be napron? That's because of rebracketing, where a word (or set of words) is split up in a different way than it was originally.

Apron was originally 'napron', and other words have had the same a/an confusion. Newts were originally ewtes, adders were nadders, and nicknames were ekenames.

Rebracketing happens a lot when borrowing words from other languages. Lots of words borrowed from Arabic start with 'al', which means 'the'. Some examples are alcohol (al-kuhl, "kohl"), algebra (al-jabr, "reunion", part of the title of a maths book), and algorithm (al-Khwārizmī, part of a mathematician's name), as well as lots of Portuguese towns and cities (e.g. Albufeira). We also have alligator (originally 'el lagarto', "the lizard") from Spanish, and ammunition (originally 'la munition', "the war supplies").

Another way rebracketing happens is when part of a word is used to form other words, or used by itself. Hamburger is "Hamburg" (the German city) +"er", but now we have all sorts of 'burgers'. Helicopter is "helico" (spiral) + "pter" (wing), but '-copter' is now used in other words, like 'quadcopter'.