It’s 100% true that people online are asking about sentences like, “I got an a hundred on the test.” That’s according to English Professor Anne Curzan, who recently got a question about “an a hundred” following a presentation she gave in Chicago.
Seeing “an a hundred” in print is jarring for many of us. Our brains don’t like having to compute two articles in a row - “a” and “an.” Does “an a hundred” sound as strange as it looks though? Probably not.
Let’s take a look at how we get to “an a hundred.”
In less formal speech, we often hear people say “a hundred” in place of “one hundred.” Both refer to the number 100. You’ll find “a” in place of “one” with other count nouns too, such as “a dozen” instead “one dozen.”
Now, let’s say you took a test, and someone asks you for your score. You might say, “I got an 84,” or “I got a 90.” If your score was 100, you might say, “I got a hundred,” but you could also say, “I got a one hundred.”
If you can say “I got a one hundred,” it’s also possible to say, “I got an a hundred.”
This applies in other situations. For instance, if you bought a tank that holds 100 gallons, you could say, “I bought a one hundred gallon tank,” or you could say, “I bought a hundred gallon tank.” You could also say, “I bought an a hundred gallon tank.”
This week we also talked about using “100 percent” as an adjective and adverb for “entirely” or “completely.” To hear that discussion, listen to the audio above.
