Is there any grammatical mistake with the words "an unique beauty"?

Question

Is it wrong to say "an unique beauty"?
If I name a painting as "an unique beauty", would it be wrong or is there no need to mention both "unique" and "an"?

Answer 1

The word beauty means the quality of being beautiful. It also means someone or something that is beautiful.

In the former sense, it's an uncountable noun. In the latter, it's a countable noun that can take an indefinite article.

You can say "a unique beauty", not an unique beauty because the letter "u" in the unique gives the sound of a consonant, not the sound of a vowel.

Answer 2

You asked:"Is it wrong to say 'an unique beauty'?"

My view on it: yes, it's wrong to say, because beauty is a noun and it could be used (it depends on the situation) as a countable or an uncountable noun in English. Let me give you some examples, and I hope those examples will help you.

An example as the countable noun

1-She was a great beauty.

An example as the uncountable noun

1-I am impressed by her beauty.

Now unique is an adjective in English and adjectives modify nouns. It's perfectly fine till now, but there is also an article an in your statement.

In English we can define the articles into two parts: definite and indefinite articles. The definite article is the and indefinite articles are a and an. The article a comes before a consonant sound and letter (b, c, d etc.) and the article an comes before a vowel sound and letter (a, e, i, o, u).

Let me go back to your statement. And as we can see in your statement you used the article an before the adjective unique but please remember "English is a language of exceptions" the adjective unique starts with the vowel u but it sounds as a consonant, so that's why we have to use the article a before the adjective.

So it should have been "a unique beauty".

There are so many other exceptions in the language, for example: an honest boy etc.

I hope it will help you!