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What about saying "a 0day" which I read as "a zero day <attack>". This same thing happens with "MVP" I think. "An MVP" sounds good, but "An Minimal Viable Prod
by saganus 10y ago
What about saying "a 0day" which I read as "a zero day <attack>".
This same thing happens with "MVP" I think. "An MVP" sounds good, but "An Minimal Viable Product" doesn't. So I use a/an depending on whether using the abbreviation or not, but I have no idea if there's a rule for this or not.
- jdmichal 10y agoThat's because "an MVP" is "an em-pee-vee". It sounds natural because the "an" is preceding a vowel sound. That does not happen in "an 0-day".
- maket 10y agoAs far as I'm aware, the rule is if the first syllable starts with a vowel, phonetically. In your example "MVP", the first syllable starts with an "em", so a vowel. In "Minimal Viable Product" the first syllable starts with the consonant sound. I had a major pain with this rule when dealing with auto-generation of some API documentation. It ended up just being an issue of detecting/guessing if the text was an abbreviation or some weird CamelCase thing.
- saganus 10y agoYeah, that's the way I've always done it because otherwise it sounds wrong. I guess someone taught me the rule and I don't remember or something.