Different from/than/to?
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Several commenters on yesterday's post "'Between you and I'", starting with Martin Schwartz, go back and forth (or round and round?) about different from vs. different than vs. different to.
So I can't resist quoting the entry for different from, different than, different to from Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage:
We have about 80 commentators in our files who discourse on the propriety of different than or different to. The amount of comment—thousands and thousands of words—might lead you to believe that there is a very complicated or subtle problem here, but there is not. These three phrases can be very simply explained: different from is the most common and is standard in both British and American usage; different than is standard in American and British usage, especially when a clause follows than, but is more frequent in American; different to is standard in British usage but rare in American usage.
After a list of examples from elite writers using all three forms, the entry continues:
The history of the controversy about different than and different to has two strands. The first is the history of the usage itself. The evidence shows to and unto as the first prepositions used, as early as the 1520s. The OED cites a 1603 comedy coauthored by Thomas Dekker for the use different to and a 1644 work by Sir Kenelm Digby for different than. From the 18th century the OED lists Addison with different from, Fielding with different to, and Goldsmith with different than.
The OED entry notes that different from was then (1897) usual, and that different to was well-attested and common in speech, but disapproved by some as incorrect. No mention is made of disapproval of different than, but a long list of standard British authors who had used it is appended. The original objection to different than appears in Baker 1770. He found this sentence in William Melmoth's translation of Cicero's letters, published in 1753:
I found your Affairs had been managed in a different Manner than what I had advised.
Commented Baker: “A different Manner than is not English. We say different to and different from; to the last of which Expressions I have in another Place given the Preference, as seeming to make the best Sense.” Leonard 1929 found the subject in no other 18th-century grammars, but Sundby et al. 1991 shows that Baker's opinion was carried down to the 19th century by a few less well-known grammarians.
At any rate, Hodgson 1889 and Raub 1897 object to different than, and it has become a favorite topic of 20th-century comment. In the first half of the century different than was regularly condemned. In the second half some still condemned it, but a majority found it acceptable to introduce a clause, because insisting on from in such instances often produces clumsy or wordy formulations. But there is still quite a bit of residual hostility to than, especially when it is followed by a noun or pronoun. This may have more to do with the question of whether than can be a preposition (see THAN 1) than with different itself.
Different to has been the subject of more nearly continuous dispute. Disapproval began with Priestley in 1768. Baker 1770 preferred from to to and he raised the often repeated point that the verb differ takes from and not to. Fowler 1926 dismissed this point as mere pedantry; notwithstanding his scorn, the argument can be found in remarks from several late 20th–century commentators.
Fowler 1926 stoutly defends different to, and his defense has probably done much to lessen British objection to the expression, although objection still lingers in many letters to The Times, as Howard 1980 reports.
In summary we can say that there need have been no problem here at all, since all three expressions have been in standard use since the 16th and 17th centuries and all three continue to be in standard use.
.I recommend buying the book, and consulting it in such cases. It won't assuage your peeves, but may help you put them into perspective.
S Frankel said,
October 6, 2025 @ 6:47 pm
Thanks so much for the extensive quotation.
I wonder why the strong objections, some of which I share (even though I recognize them as objectively without foundation). There have got to be age and geographical patterns at work beyond the obvious ones cited.
Joe said,
October 6, 2025 @ 6:59 pm
What about the verb "to differ"? I can imagine an American saying "X differs from Y", maybe a Brit saying "X differs to Y", but at least from my experience it's hard to imagine any native speaker saying "X differs than Y".
Maybe this reveals that we're not all intuiting a relationship between "different" and a preposition, let alone a functional meaning of that preposition in the context, but at least some of us are intuiting "different than" as a swap-in parallel construction to comparisons like "larger than", "cheaper than", "better than".
Olaf Zimmermann said,
October 6, 2025 @ 8:55 pm
I beg to differ on this one – hearing "different than" has always hurt my ears. "Different to", on the other hand – well, does that make me a prescriptivist? Ceci dit, dans ma civilisation, celui qui diffère de moi, loin de me léser, m'enrichit. ;-)
AntC said,
October 6, 2025 @ 9:20 pm
Prepositions are tricky — but we already knew that.
Is anybody unsettled by today's news' deployment of "untethered to reality"? [the State troops into Portland Judge's stay] I keep wanting to say "untethered from reality". Yes, in the positive you're "tethered to reality". Is the negative 'un-(tethered to) reality'? I feel it's comparable to 'divorced/detached from reality'. Another comparand wikionary has "disconnected from"
Philip Anderson said,
October 7, 2025 @ 1:32 am
@AntC
To me, “untethered from reality” implies that it was was once tethered (which I don’t think was the case), whereas “untethered to” is a simple negative. Although “divorced from reality” doesn’t imply an earlier marriage.
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 2:38 am
Joe — I can't imagine any Briton saying "X differs to Y" — the invariant pattern in British English is "X differs from Y", which is the fact to which I always cling when I cannot be sure whether I should write "different to" or "different from". At which point I remind myself that "differs" can take only "from", and therefore that should also be my preference when using "different".
Bob Ladd said,
October 7, 2025 @ 4:29 am
I just posted a comment about this on the earlier thread (Between you and I) before I noticed that a new thread specifically about different was already up and running. With apologies, here it is again:
As outlandish as different than sounds to Philip Taylor or different to sounds to Michael Watts, these are pretty well established Brit/Am differences (and in both varieties I believe different from remains the prescriptivist's preference). But this is not just a peculiarity of different — more generally, the prepositions/conjunctions used with predicates are often quite variable or even unstable. Two newish developments that I personally find odd are fed up of instead of fed up with and forbidden from [Verb]ing instead of forbidden to [Verb].
And don't get me started on substitute X with Y.
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 4:45 am
I suspect, Bob, that the "of" of "fed up of" is possibly a result of the decrease in literacy that leads many these days to say (or even write) "I could of" / "we should of" / etc. where "have" would until recently have been the norm.
Oh, and it wasn't so much the "different than" that grated in the other thread but more the excision of "how" or "what" in "It's different than [what / how] it used to be"