Meanings Meanings. Don't Get Mixed Up Again! Get Dictionary. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Some grocery stores have apparently been convinced by the chagrin, though, and use "items or fewer. Less is common following a number, as in "a package containing three less than the others," and is the typical choice after one , as in "one less worry.
A definitive rule covering all possibilities is maybe impossible. If you're a native speaker your best bet is to be guided by your ear, choosing the word that sounds more natural in a particular context. If you're not a native speaker, the simple rule is a good place to start, but be sure to consider the exceptions to it as well.
Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Usage Notes 'Fewer' and 'Less' We all want fewer problems and less trouble with fewer and less. What to Know Generally, fewer is used when the number of things is counted "fewer problems" whereas less is used when the number is measured "less trouble" or "less time".
Cookie Monster was told to eat fewer cookies. Could you give Cookie Monster less milk next time? Most often, you will not have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce whether a noun is countable or uncountable, thus the decision between less and fewer will be an effortless one. If fewer people used disposable water bottles, there would be less plastic in landfills. Molly has been drinking less water than she should on this dry day.
David makes fewer grammatical mistakes than the average person. My new furniture leaves me with less space for yoga practice. As the days passed, the rose had fewer petals left on it. In these examples, determining the countability of the nouns involved was easy. People , grammatical mistakes , and petals are all countable nouns.
As difficult as it would be to count all the people who use plastic water bottles, it would be possible to enumerate them because they are itemizable individuals. Grammarly can save you from misspellings, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and other writing issues on all your favorite websites. Plastic , water , and space , on the other hand, are uncountable; we only describe them in quantities.
However, before going into details of the difference between few and less, let us first have a look at the two words few and less separately. Few is used as a determiner, pronoun , adjective and a noun. Less is used as a determiner, pronoun, adjective, adverb as well as a preposition.
The word few gives the following meaning as the Oxford English dictionary explains. In this sentence, the usage of the word few suggests that there are only several books on the shelf. Also, when you put article the before the word few, it becomes the noun few.
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