Greg Bales

Fewer v. Less

In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb

When I first made the blog public, the first thing K asked was “Shouldn’t it be ‘Fewer than a Million’?” I explained that the distinction she was making between less and fewer never actually existed in standard English usage except under the stern eye of grade-school grammarians. Besides, I said, the title is the second half of the inequality x < 1,000,000. Read the inequality aloud, and you get “x is less than one million.” Substitute the fact that my sperm count is the generalized variable, and Voilà! Blog title.

I thought that my explanation had settled everything, but a few weeks later, K complained about the title again. This time, I said that the real problem with the blog title was her pedantry, and I suggested that we would both be happier if she would just mind her own business. This suggestion was not received well.

But what could I say? I needed to make a case from authority. So I turned to my favorite usage dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, which is rife with fascinating discussions of both common and arcane points of style. In this case, the relevant entry is available online courtesy of Mark Liberman:

Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault—it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.

As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on 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 strictly proper.—Baker 1770

Baker’s remarks about fewer express clearly and modestly—“I should think,” “appears to me”—his own taste and preference. …

How Baker’s opinion came to be an inviolable rule, we do not know. But we do know that many people believe it is such. Simon 1980, for instance, calls the “less than 50,000 words” he found in a book about Joseph Conrad a “whopping” error.

The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great—he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin—more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker’s lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated. …

If you are a native speaker, your use of less and fewer can reliably be guided by your ear. If you are not a native speaker, you will find that the simple rule with which we started is a safe guide, except for the constructions for which we have shown less to be preferred.

Update: Serendipity!