The word “an” is an indefinite article used before vowel sounds to refer to a single, non-specific thing or person. Writers use it to introduce examples, objects, or ideas without specifying them. The examples below are drawn from authentic works to show how “an” appears in real writing.
Real Sentences for An
It was Tars Tarkas, and I could read his thoughts as they were an open book for the undisguised loathing upon his face.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
23 words, 119 characters
He had no love for authority, and certainly not the slightest intention of submitting to the domination of an ordinary Swede sailor.
Source: The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
22 words, 132 characters
I followed rapidly until, darkness shutting down, I was forced to await the rising of the moon, and given an opportunity to speculate on the question of the wisdom of my chase.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
32 words, 176 characters
She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it.
Source: The Ambassadors by Henry James
34 words, 187 characters
He directed that I remove his body to Virginia without embalming, and that he be laid in an open coffin within a tomb which he previously had had constructed and which, as I later learned, was well ventilated.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
38 words, 210 characters
I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me—“How I, when a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?”
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
42 words, 212 characters
I cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
43 words, 228 characters
Powell, I knew, was well armed and, further, an experienced Indian fighter; but I too had lived and fought for years among the Sioux in the North, and I knew that his chances were small against a party of cunning trailing Apaches.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
42 words, 230 characters
Possibly the suggestions which I gained upon Mars, and the knowledge which I can set down in this chronicle, will aid in an earlier understanding of the mysteries of our sister planet; mysteries to you, but no longer mysteries to me.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
41 words, 233 characters
Schliemann called himself a “philosophic anarchist”; and he explained that an anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by laws save those of its own being.
Source: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
38 words, 237 characters
At the close of the Civil War I found myself possessed of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain’s commission in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
46 words, 257 characters
He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
64 words, 339 characters
Upon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventure in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentlemen in Richmond, VA, who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public.
Source: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
77 words, 423 characters
More examples coming soon.
