-a³

Informal terms in spoken English.

Taken from rapid or casual pronunciations.

This ending seeks to represent what happens to various linking words in rapid speech. Most are more common in American English than British.

Examples where it replaces of include kinda (kind of), lotsa (lots of), and sorta (sort of). The same happens with to, for example in gonna (going to), gotta (got to), and wanna (want to). It can also represent an elided form of have, as in coulda (could have), shoulda (should have), and woulda (would have). Others indicate the partial loss of a final unstressed syllable, as with fella (from fellow).

Characteristically British examples include cuppa (cup of, especially a cup of tea, now well established as an informal noun), and pinta (pint of, especially of milk, popularised by a slogan used in advertisements by the then National Dairy Council from 1959 on: drinka pinta milka day).