I searched for patterns such as" a np" and" a nd" in the GitHub codebase, because they are most likely to contain grammatical mistakes. Then I manually reviewed which ones needed to be changed. These patterns are not exhaustive, so a few issues of ("a" vs "an") still remain.

The correct usages are"a np" and"an nd" , because the phonetic spelling of the word starts with a vowel.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/indefinite-articles-a-and-an/

I intentionally did not include[skip actions][skip azp][skip cirrus] in the commit, because one change is in the error message.

DOC: Correct wording usage such as a/an

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github-actionsbot added the 04 - Documentation label

Dec 7, 2025

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github-actionsbot commentedDec 7, 2025

Diff frommypy_primer, showing the effect of this PR on type check results on a corpus of open source code:

pandas (https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas)- /home/runner/work/numpy/numpy/numpy_base/numpy/__init__.pyi:740: error: Type statement is only supported in Python 3.12 and greater  [syntax]+ /home/runner/work/numpy/numpy/numpy_to_test/numpy/__init__.pyi:740: error: Type statement is only supported in Python 3.12 and greater  [syntax]

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jakevdp commentedDec 8, 2025•
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Part of this depends on how you read it: e.g. I tend to read "a np.ndarray" as "a numpy-dot-ndarray", so "a" is gramatically the right choice. However, if you read it as "a en-pee-dot-ndarray", then I could see wanting to switch "a" to "an". But the ambiguity suggests that replacing "a" with "an" everywhere is probably not worth worrying about.

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DOC: Correct wording usage such as a/an#30390

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DOC: Correct wording usage such as a/an#30390