Question

Is there a method that works similar to singularize to prepend “a” or “an according to the word?

• like f(apple) # => an apple
• f(carpet) #=> a carpet

Answer 1

Look here http://deveiate.org/projects/Linguistics/wiki/English and check out this question

If you need something simpler, something that will for instance prepend “an” if a word starts with vowel, you can use my one liner:

String.class_eval { def prepend; %w(a e i o u).include?(downcase.first) ? "an #{self}" : "a #{self}"; end }

Put this in a file prepend.rb in config/initializers folder of your application.

Then you will be able to use

"carrot".prepend => "a carrot"
"apple".prepend => "an apple"