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Difficultés anglaises

> article Definite article:• A term for "the", which is the most frequently used word in the English language. "The" is used to refer back to a person or thing that has already been mentioned, as in "Jack and Jill built a model. The model was of a ship" and "We've bought a car. It was the cheapest car we could find".• "The" can be used to make a general statement about all things of a particular type, as in "The computer has led to the loss of many jobs" and "The car has caused damage to the environment". "The" can be used to refer to a whole class or group, as in "the Italians", "the Browns" and "the younger generation".• "The" can also be used to refer to services or systems, as in "They are not on the phone" and "She prefers going by the bus". It can be used to refer to the name of a musical instrument when someone's ability to play it is being referred to, as in "Her son is learning to play the violin".• "The" indicates a person or thing to be the only one, as in the Bible, the King of Spain, the White House, the Palace of Westminster and the President of the United States.• "The" can be used instead of a possessive determiner to refer to parts of the body, as in "She took him by the arm" and "The dog bit him on the leg".• "The" is used in front of superlative adjectives, as in "the largest amount of money" and "the most beautiful woman". It can also be used to indicate that a person or thing is unique or exceptional, as in "the political debater of his generation". In this last sense "the" is pronounced "thee".• Indefinite article:• A and an are the forms of the indefinite article. The form a is used before words that begin with a consonant sound, as "a box", "a garden", "a road", "a wall". The form an is used before words that begin with a vowel sound, as "an apple", "an easel", "an ostrich", "an uncle". Note that it is the sound of the initial letter that matters and not the spelling. Thus a is used before words beginning with a u when they are pronounced with a y sound as though it were a consonant, as "a unit", "a usual occurrence". Similarly, an is used, for example, before words beginning with the letter h where this is not pronounced, as in "an heir", "an hour", "an honest man".• Formerly it was quite common to use an before words that begin with an h sound and also begin with an unstressed syllable, as in "an hotel (ho-tel)", "an historic (his-tor-ik) occasion", "an hereditary (her-ed-it-ary) disease". It is now more usual to use a in such cases and ignore the question of the unstressed syllable. Pour éviter fautes de grammaire, contresens et confusions. The English Usage Dictionary est le parfait complément des dictionnaires bilingues, du dictionnaire de définitions anglaises et du Thesaurus. Ce dictionnaire signale toutes les difficultés que recèle l'usage d'un mot: orthographe, grammaire, prononciation, homonymies, etc. Exemple d'article du dictionnaire English Usage Dictionary