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"
Chris Button said,
October 7, 2025 @ 5:22 am
"off of" is an interesting one too. "Get off the couch." "Get off of the couch".
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 6:52 am
"Off of" was definitely deemed an error when I was at school, Chris (1952–1963) — the English equivalent of what my French master would have called a "criminal mistake" in French.
Kate Bunting said,
October 7, 2025 @ 7:51 am
I think 'off of' is regional. I don't hear it here in the English Midlands, except from people raised in South-East England (c.f. the Rolling Stones' 'Get off of my cloud').
Andrew Usher said,
October 7, 2025 @ 8:15 am
Many years ago here we had a thread showing genuine uses of 'differ to', all British in origin: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4679 and I have encountered some personally as well. I doubt the rate has decreased since then.
A few of those appeared where traditional usage would have 'differ with' (deliberately dissent from someone else's view). As there is no 'differ than', there is also no 'different(ly) with', though 'difference' behaves like 'differ'.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Coby said,
October 7, 2025 @ 8:35 am
Philip Taylor: I have always interpreted the British "fed up of" as being by analogy with "tired of", since they mean pretty much the same.
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 9:03 am
Fair enough, I would not seek to challenge that perfectly reasonable interpretation Coby.
Rodger C said,
October 7, 2025 @ 9:39 am
As far as the motivation for "different than" goes: "different" always implies either more or less of something, and both "more" and "less" take "than."
Robert Coren said,
October 7, 2025 @ 9:41 am
My parents, both book editors by profession, were decidedly prescriptivist in most such matters, and back in the 1950s and '60s such folks frowned on different than. I remember my brother using that form and eliciting the following from my father: "Do you differ than us?" … which led him to add, whimsically, "Are you differ than us?"
(Prescriptively speaking, he should probably have used "we" rather than "us", but that would have sounded impossibly stilted.)
ktschwarz said,
October 7, 2025 @ 10:16 am
Kate Bunting is right, "off of" is regional in England. See Separated by a Common Language for discussion of a paper about that, with maps showing the distribution in Early English Books Online (1500s-1600s) as well as News on the Web. The paper suggests that American "off of" originated with English colonists since "many of the early colonies were founded by people from East Anglia", and quotes examples from the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (both from Kent) have been recorded saying "off of" in interviews, not only in lyrics.
"Off of" is normal in the high-prestige American writing of the New Yorker; Mary Norris uses it.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 7, 2025 @ 1:28 pm
Whereas at least in US "jump out of the window" / "jump out the window" both check
But "walk out of the room" / "walk out the room" former check, latter verboten in prestige-talk
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 2:25 pm
I think that in British English there is a difference between "walk out of the room" and "walk out the room", the latter being what I believe is often referred to as "performative". That is, if one leaves the room normally, one walks out of the room, but if one leaves the room in disgust (for example, or "in high dudgeon"), one "walks out the room".
Michael Watts said,
October 7, 2025 @ 5:04 pm
Even if for is used, you cannot reliably tell in current usage whether the speaker meant that X is replacing Y or Y is replacing X. To be unambiguous you'd need to have a sentence like substitute X in place of Y.
I haven't really noticed people using with, but I'm pretty annoyed by the loss of directionality in this verb.
Michael Watts said,
October 7, 2025 @ 5:08 pm
The situation in America is different. For me, "walking out the room" is a grammatical error. The phrasing appears to be specified by the noun; I cannot jump out the room, but I can walk out the window. I would say that "out the window" represents a direction and should be usable in most constructions that call for a direction; "out of the room" feels like something else that I don't have a good characterization for.
stephen said,
October 7, 2025 @ 9:28 pm
I have noticed something which seems very strange. A woman is "wife to" someone, rather than "wife of" someone. Maybe the difference is in the emphasis. "Wife to" seems to emphasize her association with a man. "Wife of" seems to put the emphasis on her instead. Are both uses equally old? Are they equally common?
Bob Ladd said,
October 8, 2025 @ 12:21 am
@Michael Watts:
Yes, the ambiguity of "substitute X with Y" is the problem. The clearest way to avoid the ambiguity seems to be to say "replace X with Y" or "replace Y with X" instead. (In effect, you have to "substitute replace for substitute" in order to be clear.)
Michael Watts said,
October 8, 2025 @ 12:30 am
Given that the verb is ambiguous (in practice, as people use it) even when paired with for, I'm inclined to guess that the causality runs the other way – people stopped thinking of the verb as having asymmetrical arguments, and therefore they started using the symmetrical with instead of the asymmetrical for.
Michael Watts said,
October 8, 2025 @ 12:42 am
My thoughts:
– I don't agree that a woman is "wife to" her husband rather than "the wife of" her husband. I recognize both forms. (I need the the, though — I wouldn't accept a sentence like She is wife of John. She is wife to John is fine.)
– Other roles might behave this way, but I don't think the construction is productive.
– Related to the observation that it's an unproductive construction, "wife to" feels archaic to me, which should not be taken to reflect a claim that either form is older than the other. I would expect to see it only in fairly stilted contexts.
– The verb for a woman marrying in Mandarin uses the dative complement 给. The verb for a man uses 到, the complement of success, instead. This is interesting but probably not directly relevant; "wife to" has a parallel in "husband to".
Pamela said,
October 10, 2025 @ 5:42 pm
It doesn't bother me (too much) when people use "different than" when speaking colloquially, but I think it is not a trivial thing that people use this when composing English sentences. Not because is it ungrammatical but because it is illogical, and shows that people are not thinking about what they are writing. Different from, different to, I don't care–both have the same logic: Two things implied in the comparison are either different, or not. There is no "than." The only way you can get "than" is if you want to say "A is more different from B than C is different from B." Different is absolute, "than" is comparative. This is a really fundamental logical operator, and people thinking they never have to examine the logic of what they are saying is a problem (yes, pedantry here: I was convinced of the importance of this while teaching, and seeing up close that the befuddlement of "different than" really precisely revealed the befuddlement that students bring to their writing unless they become conscious of problems like this and solve them). To me, it's a bigger problem than people not understanding or using objective case, or not understanding and using past perfect. That is just a matter of appearing well educated, or not. "Different than" shows a real disinterest in linking language to logic.
Philip Taylor said,
October 11, 2025 @ 3:41 am
"shows that people are not thinking about what they are writing" — your words struck home, Pamela, because I am currently involved in a multi-day interaction with ChatGPT, which's help I am seeking to create images to depict the text that is to appear on a poster (as will the images, when ready). And ChatGPT's most recent attempt was very poor, so I was about to write "No, that is awful" when I thought of your words, realised that it did not inspire awe, rejected the construct and went on to consider "No, that is terrible". But of course it did not inspire terror either, so I was stymied. What word should one who cares about etymology use when hoi polloi would use "awful" or "terrible" without thinking ?
Robert Coren said,
October 11, 2025 @ 10:29 am
Expecting language, even written language, to follow strict rules of logic is always going to result in frustration. "Different than" is definitely illogical, but it's out there in the wild and not going away. (I have a vague recollection from my youth of someone – I think it was actually a teacher – saying "They're no different than you are", which is really illogical, but I'm guessing that the appending of the verb was triggered by the presence of than.)
@Philip Taylor: If you're going to restrict your usage of "awful" and "terrible" to things that actually inspire awe and terror respectively, you're to be stopping and thinking way more than is practical; and if you're going to be upset when other people use them more loosely, you're going to be going around with high blood pressure for the rest of your life.
Philip Taylor said,
October 11, 2025 @ 11:30 am
No no : I wouldn't be the least upset if others used "awful" or "terrible" in ways that didn't reflect their etymologies, Robert — I simply want to try to avoid using them in such myself, rather in the way that I will use "fewer" rather than "less" when speaking of count nouns.
Adrian Bailey said,
October 12, 2025 @ 7:07 pm
"off of" may have been regional in Britain in the 17th century, but was it regional in Britain in the 20th century? I've always thought it was reintroduced from the US.
kb2 said,
October 14, 2025 @ 4:35 am
@Pamela – I agree that "different than" implies that "different" is a comparative. In my experience, American usage is at least consistent, in that one often sees "much different", rather than "very different".
Philip Taylor said,
October 14, 2025 @ 5:42 am
In British English, KB2, "not much different" is a common idiom whereas "much different" is (I would say) virtually unknown, "very different" being how we would express such a concept.