In grammar, an article is any of a small set of words or affixes (such as a, an, and the in English) used with nouns to limit or give definiteness to the application. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. These words represent a specific object, depending on the situation, but a is less specific than the.

Articles combine with nouns to form noun phrases, and typically specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase. In English, the and a (rendered as an when followed by a vowel sound) are the definite and indefinite articles respectively. Articles in many other languages also carry additional grammatical information such as gender, number, and case. Articles are part of a broader category called determiners, which also include demonstratives, possessive determiners, and quantifiers. In linguistic interlinear glossing, articles are abbreviated as art.

Types of article

Definite article

A definite article is an article that marks a definite noun phrase. Definite articles, such as the English the, are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned, or it may be something uniquely specified.

For example, Sentence 1 uses the definite article and thus expresses a request for a particular book. In contrast, Sentence 2 uses an indefinite article and thus conveys that the speaker would be satisfied with any book.

  1. Give me the book.
  2. Give me a book.

The definite article can also be used in English to indicate a specific class among other classes:

The cabbage white butterfly lays its eggs on.
Members of the Brassica genus.

Some languages (such as the continental North Germanic languages, Bulgarian or Romanian) have definite articles only as suffixes.

Indefinite article

An indefinite article is an article that marks an indefinite noun phrase. Indefinite articles are those such as English "a" or "an", which do not refer to a specific identifiable entity. Indefinites are commonly used to introduce a new discourse referent which can be referred back to in subsequent discussion:

  1. A monster ate a cookie. His name is Cookie Monster.

Indefinites can also be used to generalize over entities who have some property in common:

  1. A cookie is a wonderful thing to eat.

Indefinites can also be used to refer to specific entities whose precise identity is unknown or unimportant.

  1. A monster must have broken into my house last night and eaten all my cookies.
  2. A friend of mine told me that happens frequently to people who live on Sesame Street.

Indefinites also have predicative uses:

  1. Leaving my door unlocked was a bad decision.

Indefinite noun phrases are widely studied within linguistics, in particular because of their ability to take exceptional scope.

Proper article

A proper article indicates that its noun is proper, and refers to a unique entity. It may be the name of a person, the name of a place, the name of a planet, etc. The Māori language has the proper article a, which is used for personal nouns; so, "a Pita" means "Peter". In Māori, when the personal nouns have the definite or indefinite article as an important part of it, both articles are present; for example, the phrase "a Te Rauparaha", which contains both the proper article a and the definite article Te refers to the person named Te Rauparaha.

The definite article is used with some proper names, called arthrous proper nouns (from Greek ἄρθρον "a joint; an article").[1] Examples include the Amazon or the Hebrides. In these cases, the definite article may be considered superfluous as the referent is specified by definition (there is just one of them). Its presence can be accounted for by the assumption that they are shorthand for a longer phrase in which the name is a specifier, i.e. the Amazon River, the Hebridean Islands.[citation needed] Where the nouns in such longer phrases cannot be omitted, the definite article is universally kept: the United States, the People's Republic of China. Proper nouns that do not start with a definite article are called anarthrous proper nouns.

This distinction can sometimes become a political matter: the former usage the Ukraine stressed the word's Russian meaning of "borderlands"; as Ukraine became a fully independent state following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it requested that formal mentions of its name omit the article. Similar shifts in usage have occurred in the names of Sudan and both Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa); a move in the other direction occurred with The Gambia. In certain languages, such as French and Italian, definite articles are used with all or most names of countries: la France, le Canada, l'Allemagne; l'Italia, la Spagna, il Brasile.

Some languages use definite articles with personal names, as in Portuguese (a Maria, literally: "the Maria"), Greek (η Μαρία, ο Γιώργος, ο Δούναβης, η Παρασκευή), and Catalan (la Núria, el/en Oriol). Such usage also occurs colloquially or dialectally in Spanish, German, French, Italian and other languages. In Hungarian, the colloquial use of definite articles with personal names, though widespread, is considered a Germanism.

The definite article sometimes appears in nicknames such as "the Donald" referring to US president Donald Trump, "the Gipper" referring to Ronald Reagan[3], "The Don" referring to cricketer Donald Bradman", "The Peacemaker" referring to Czar Alexander III, or "The Hoff" referring to David Hasselhoff.