'Less' and 'fewer'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This controversy rumbles on.  The basic rule is:

Less of amount; fewer of number.

(We’ll talk about rules in a moment.)

Use fewer when referring to anything that you can count.

    These days, people buy fewer newspapers.

    We have fewer women studying science than we would like.

Use less when you’re referring to something that can’t be counted or doesn’t have a plural (for example: air, time, traffic, music).

    At the end of the week I always seem to have less money.

    Now that I’m singing regularly in a choir, I listen to less music on the radio.

We also use less with numbers on their own.

    His weight fell from 18 stone to less than 12.

When numbers refer to distance, time, ages or sums of money, we use less.  That’s because we’re thinking of the number as measuring an amount of distance, time, age or money; we’re not counting the individual kilometres, minutes, years or pennies.

    Their marriage lasted less than two years.

    Trafalgar Square is less than three miles from the Tower of London.

    The project should take less than four weeks to complete.

    They had been married for less than three years.

    The operation should cost less than £3000. 

In 2008, The Daily Telegraph reported that Tesco was replacing its checkout notices reading ‘Ten items or less’ after a long-standing run-in with grammatical sticklers.  An admirably honest spokesman for the store admitted:  “The debate about what is right has been going on for years now, and I still don't think we know if 'less' or 'fewer' is correct.”

Maybe, in the end, they needn’t have worried.  The Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage later commented:

    Supermarket checkouts are correct when the signs they display read 5 items or less (which     refers to a total amount), and are misguidedly pedantic when they read 5 items or fewer     (which emphasizes individuality, surely not the intention).

 [Thanks to the Oxford Words blog for that citation.]

And in fact, the whole controversy about less and fewer is arguably a case of misguided pedantry. 

The plain fact is that English speakers have use less for countable nouns for the best part of a thousand years. 

Both less and few derive from old Germanic languages, and they’re first recorded in Old English texts in the 700s.  Alfred the Great, no less, used less with countable nouns, in around 888.

Swa mid læs worda swa mid ma, swæðer we hit yereccan mayon.

With less words or with more, whether we may prove it.

Some say that’s because he was using a partitive genitive. 

Whoa: definition alert. 

The word 'genitive' refers to possession.  The word 'manager's' in the manager's office is in the genitive.  We can also say the office of the manager - though we probably wouldn't.  But we can say most of the managers - and that's a partitive genitive:  a genitive used to indicate a whole divided into parts.  Most of us is another typical example. 

Keeping up? 

Well, læs worda when Alfred wrote it means literally ‘less of words’.  When English lost its genitive plural case – at the end of the Old English period – people simply dropped the of (as you do), and started saying less words (or sheep, or cakes, or whatever’s countable). 

And we’ve continued to use this construction ever since.

Fewer, the comparative of few, appeared in English much later, around 1340.   So it was always rather weaker in the folk memory than less. 

Fewer received a bit of a boost in the late 18^th century – when so many ‘rules’ of correctness were born.  In 1770, Robert Baker wrote his Reflections on the English Language, which was seemingly the first in a long line of guides to correct English usage (of which Fowler is now probably the most famous).  Baker cautiously commented on the use of less:

    This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do     better. "No Fewer than a Hundred" appears to me, not only more elegant than "No less than a     Hundred," but more strictly proper.  

And, with those thoughtful and modest words, a rule was born. 

By 1856, when New York publisher Daniel Burgess brought out the anonymous Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence, the use of less for fewer had become regarded as a - well - daily mistake.

And we've been worrying about it ever since.

The distinction can be useful.  Burchfield quotes a newspaper magazine:

School leavers.  Over the next few years, you're going to see a lot fewer of them.

Which certainly means something quite different to you'll see a lot less of them.

But on the whole, most of us will probably continue to prefer less to fewer - and misguided pedants will continue to rail at us.

All of which goes to show that, like so many rules of usage, this one is essentially artificial.  It doesn't reflect the 'natural' usage of native speakers.  In the end, as The Cambridge Guide to English Usage reminds us, the choice between fewer and less is - more or less - not a matter of correctness, but of style.