Definition:
In English, the definite article the is a determiner that refers to particular nouns. See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer."
(Jessamyn West) - "Writers will happen in the best of families."
(Rita Mae Brown) - "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
(Thomas Jefferson) - "The is the most commonly used word in the English language, occurring nearly 62,000 times in every million words written or uttered--or about once in every 16 words. That's more than twice as often as the runner-up, of. . . .
"Americans do have a thing for the word the. We say 'in the hospital' and 'in the spring'; the British sensibly omit the article. They favor collective or purely regional sports team names, such as Manchester United or Arsenal, while we have the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels (which when you translate the Spanish becomes 'the the Angels Angels'), and such syntactical curiosities as the Utah Jazz and the Orlando Magic."
(Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, Broadway Books, 2007) - "Leaving 'the' out often reads like jargon: say the conference agreed to do something, not 'conference agreed'; the government has to do, not 'government has to'; the Super League (rugby), not 'Super League.'"
(David Marsh, Guardian Style, Guardian Books, 2007) - "If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning."
(Carl Rogers)
Pronunciation: DEF-i-nit ART-i-kul
