alt Hacker NewsThis is a common overcorrection. It's 100% "a historic" if you're pronouncing the "h" (which everyone does).
People who say "an historic" are wrong - they're imagining there's some exception that there isn't.
You can easily tell they're wrong because who says "an history lesson"?
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"a history lesson" and "an historic event" have different stress in the history area (or at least they can have, depending on the phrase context), and I think that explains it.
Saying "a historic event" requires you to pause and stress the start of historic (a + glottal stop + "his" + ...). It's a natural phrasing pattern to have the initial part of historic unstressed, and then the h is effectively dropped even if you're not speaking an h-dropping dialect; this way "an historic event" follows as correct.
We simplify a lot of sounds in unstressed parts of words, but because we know and "see" the spelling, our brains can keep the illusion of the whole word going for us.
> because who says "an history lesson"?
People speaking dialects that don't pronounce the "h" in "history". Which used to be a lot more common when this rule was written down. I've heard several English dialects that pronounce "historian" like "istorian", and who would say "a istorian"?
English is full of obscure rules that were written down ages ago, often because one particular guy wrote down his personal preference and others accepted it as fact ("less" vs "fewer", for instance).
English speakers still can't agree whether the h in "herb" is pronounced or not. I don't see why anyone would be surprised that other words beginning with h are also subject to debate.