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Why the use of the article 'An' instead of 'A' ?

They must pronounce it S P A, not "spa". In which case, it's "an" because S sounds like "ess", which starts with a vowel-like sound, so you use "an".

I also pronounce it S P A, so "an" seemed immediately correct to me.

You have no idea how many times I went back and forth on this.

Glad you and I are on the same page, like the comment above you, it's the difference between it being an acronym (SPA) or an initialism (S, P, A).

Because you use "An" if the following starts with a vowel sound, and "SPA" (spoken as the individual letters) does. (EDIT: fell for a false friend, fixed)

Interesting. Do you generally pronunce it as Es-pea-ay? In that case it warrants the an in front

I do. I had never though about pronouncing it as spa, the word.

Sounds similar to the battles between es-queue-el and sequel for SQL.

Interesting, thanks for the insight, I was completely unaware of this one.

Most wouldn’t read an acronym phonetically if it happens to spell a commonly used word.

FWIW, I've never heard anyone say "spa" for SPAs (including conference talks by native speakers, so not just local bubble).

Perhaps it's a culture thing. I am from The Netherlands and I have never heard someone say es-pea-ay; everyone I know pronounces it as "spa". Conference talks in both Dutch and English all pronounce it is as "spa" as well, even native english speakers

On the other end of the spectrum, some people at a past job took to calling interactive but self-contained pages "day spas".

I read this comment and thought about it a lot. I don't think that's the rule. For example, US abbreviating United States. Nobody reads it as "us", even though that's a commonly used word.

U.S. would be initialism, not an acronym. I think we’ve stumbled into a linguistic grey area. Really a matter preference I guess.

https://abbreviations.yourdictionary.com/reference/abbreviat...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/whats-an-acron...

Have you polled web developers? There have been some attempts to do so [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/zachleat/status/1230239491014656001

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