If you're a foreign learner looking for advice as to what preposition to use after
different, I'd recommend using
from; that way you won't
tread on anybody's toes. You can read more about the use of
different and easily confusable words such as
other and
next here. That advice, however, turns out to be more of a case of 'do what the teacher says' rather than what the teacher does.
This post brings together information from dictionaries and usage guides, a few statistics, as well as examples from the press and a few books. There are also some links to linguistics books that discuss the question.
If you'd asked me a year ago what preposition follows different, I'd have no doubt said from without a moment's thought. But last year I posted a comment on the language blog Pain in the English:
I think the position of the subjunctive is very different in British English to that in American English
And was answered with:
Tsk tsk - "Different from" laddie!!
It turns out that in fact I often say
different to rather than
different from. Somewhat
miffed at apparently being caught out making a mistake, I decided to investigate, first stop the
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, my old favourite:
different (from/to/than somebody/something)English is significantly different from British English.
(British English) It's very different to what I'm used to.
(North American English) He saw he was no different than anybody else. So it looked as though I was OK, but I needed some more reassurance, so I checked a couple of usage guides. First, Robert Burchfield in New Fowler's
The commonly expressed view that different should only be followed by from and never by to or than is not supportable in the face of present evidence or of logic, though the distribution of the constructions is not straightforward.
And what about Fowler himself? In The King's English, published in 1908, Fowler wrote:
There is no essential reason whatever [
different] should not be as well followed by
to as by
from. But
different to is regarded by many newspaper editors and others in authority as a solecism, and is therefore better avoided by those to whom the approval of such authorities is important.
By the time he published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (one of the most influential usage guides to British English) in 1926, Fowler was much more strident:
That different can only be followed by from and not to is a superstition. Not only is it to be 'found in writers of all ages' (OED); the principle on which ot is rejected (You do not say differ from; therefore you cannot say different from) involves a hasty and ill-defined generalization.
Then I checked with Michael Swan's Practical English Usage:
From is generally used after different; many British people use to. In American English, than is common. American football is very different from/to soccer
A pattern seemed to be emerging. Finally, I found this in a section called Better Writing at Oxford Dictionaries:
Is there any difference between the expressions different from, different than, and different to? Is one of the three ‘more correct’ than the others?
In practice, different from is by far the most common of the three, in both British and American English. Different than is mainly used in American English. Different to is much more common in British English than American English.
Some people criticize different than as incorrect but there’s no real justification for this view. There’s little difference in sense between the three expressions, and all of them are used by respected writers.
And in a usage note under the entry for
different, they say:
Different to is common in Britain, but is disliked by traditionalists. The argument against it is based on the relation of different to differ, which is used with from; but this is a flawed argument which is contradicted by other pairs of words such as accord (with) and according (to).
The story so far
It's clear that different from is the most common form on both sides of the Atlantic, but that different to is quite often used in Britain, although its use in North America is very rare, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. Meanwhile different than is used quite often in North America, and to a lesser extent in Britain.
While most dictionaries list all three forms without much comment or approvingly, and the major usage guides seem to find all of them perfectly justified, there are a lot of people out there who for some reason think that different to and different than are wrong.
Being British, my main concern here is with different to. My main aim here is to show that the use of different to is perfectly standard and respectable in British English.
The British Press - the qualities
Apart from the Times and the Economist, the British broadsheets (to use a rather anachronistic term) seem quite open to different to, and the difference between the from and to forms is narrower than those statistics we've just looked at would suggest.
The figures show the number of Google hits I got by doing site searches for 'different from' and 'different to' at the beginning of March 2013. Click on the links to see examples, although the figures will obviously vary a bit. In fact some seem to fluctuate quite widely day to day.
The figures for different than will be boosted by the occasional comparative, "more different than", but these don't seem to be so common as to skew the figures completely
| from | to | than |
| The Guardian | 22,500 | 10,200 | 7,920 |
| The Independent | 14,000 | 4,160 | 478 |
| The Times | 1,060 | 568 | 47 |
| The Telegraph | 9,460 | 5,270 | 573 |
| The Financial Times | 8,670 | 2,470 | 597 |
| The Economist | 10,800 | 1,290 | 2,830 |
| The London Review of Books | 832 | 53 | 6 |
The Independent
The Independent annoyed some of its readers when it suggested that there was "nothing much wrong" with different to.
The admission last week that this column sees nothing very much wrong with "different to" has shocked the pedant community.
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