Different to revisited

The preposition that most commonly follows 'different', on both sides of the Atlantic, is 'from' - 'She's very different from her sister'. In North America, however, some people also say 'different than', and in Britain, some people also say 'different to'. A year or so ago I discovered that I seem to be one of the latter, on some occasions, at least.

About nine months ago I wrote a post on different to (link below), on how much it is used, and on how acceptable it is, in British English. In this post, I want to take a more historical view, with the aid of Google Books clippings facility, which I've only recently discovered. Click on any of the clippings to see the original at Google Books.

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.