Is It “ A Utopia” or “ An Utopia”

In early texts, when an indefinite article immediately preceded the English noun utopia or utopian or the adjective utopian (or the eu- counterparts of such words), the article was nearly always an, even though (during much of that interval, at least) those “utopian” words were commonly pronounced with an initial consonant /y/, as they are today. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did constructions like a utopia and a utopian start to appear with any regularity in the written record. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thirty-three recorded instances of an occur before “utopian” words, only two of a

Adjective · Art · Art history · Linguistics · Literature · Noun · Utopia · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction