Some random thoughts on different to

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.

The King's English

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.

Oxford Dictionaries

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.

Some statistics

As this graph of usage in a cross-section of British books shows, different from is indeed much more common than different to and different than, at least in books:

Mark Israel at the excellent alt.usage.english website quotes these figures from the Collins Cobuild Bank of English:

	from	to	than
U.K. writing	87.6	10.8	1.5
U.K. speech	68.8	27.3	3.9
U.S. writing	92.7	0.3	7.0
U.S. speech	69.3	0.6	30.1

A simple search at the British National Corpus brought up similar figures

	from	to	than
U.K.	3275	484	51

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.

The Independent - Errors and Omissions - The original story

The Guardian

The Guardian seems to have a fairly relaxed attitude (at least to different to).

different from - is traditionally the correct form; different to is widely accepted nowadays ... Different than is wrong, at least in British English; and it's always differs from, not differs to

Guardian Style Guide

Explaining his apparent Damascene conversion, he told the Guardian's Sarah Boseley in October how the current situation is different to that of 30 years ago.

Guardian

The Telegraph

Strangely, the normally conservative Telegraph doesn't appear to have a problem with different to either, having the highest ratio of to to from in Google site searches.

The Economist

The Economist Style Guide brooks no nonsense

Different from, not to or than.

Economist Style Guide

But of course it also has to report what people say, so it cannot be totally to or than free, as we can see in the number of Google hits. The relatively high figure for than, no doubt reflects the fact that the Economist is more American-orientated than others.