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In US English, I've only ever seen 'a history', but I have seen 'an historian'. I'm really not sure why.


"historian" is a fairly long word. If you stop to create a word break, and then aspirate heavily on the "h", it can be uncomfortable to say. If you don't, then the "h" can get very soft if people try to say the whole word quickly and I imagine that some people drop the "h" entirely because of that, or make the "h" so soft it feels natural to contract




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