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The words “adder” and “apron” used to begin with /n/ (Old English nǣdre, Old French napperon), but after saying “a nadder” and “a napron” for a few centuries, people genuinely forgot that it wasn’t “an adder” and “an apron”; and the latter interpretations stuck.
The opposite happened for “newt” and “nickname”, which were ewte and ekename respectively in Middle English. The same process occured: “an ekename” and “an ewte” convinced people that the words genuinely started with the /n/ sound.
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