18

Less and Fewer

Less and fewer attract more than their fair share of criticism from language observers. Here’s what you need to know:

Less and fewer function as both pronouns and determiners.

He has less ambition.

He has less.

William has fewer friends than Ron.

William has fewer.

The controversy arises from the fact that less and fewer are traditionally perceived to have distinct jobs. But the popular understanding of those jobs is a little too simplistic.

According to conventional wisdom, less applies to noncount nouns like milk and gasoline.

The car has less gas than I thought.

She’s drinking less milk than she used to.

Fewer, then, applies to count nouns like apple and pencil.

I see fewer apples on the tree this year.

We go through fewer pencils now that we type everything.

But that’s not a rule. It’s a tendency. There’s a more meaningful way to view the difference between less and fewer, and it’s illustrated in the comparison of these examples:

That’s one less thing to worry about. (Correct.)

That’s one fewer thing to worry about. (Incorrect.)

Most people would agree that less works better in this sentence than fewer—a fact directly at odds with the “rule” about count and noncount nouns. After all, thing is a count noun. Yet it clearly works better with less than with fewer.

The better way to understand the difference between less and fewer—one that explains why one fewer thing sounds so bad—is this: less goes with singular nouns. Fewer goes with plural nouns. This guideline accommodates the count-noun-versus-noncount-noun interpretation because noncount nouns are singular. But when you follow this guideline, you’re not stuck having to say you have one fewer something when, clearly, one less is better.

So when you’re in the express lane that serves customers with ten items or fewer and you realize you have eleven items in your cart, you can remove one, giving you one less item, not one fewer item.

But if you don’t want to fuss over less and fewer, good news: their definitions overlap. Less, according to many dictionaries, can be used to mean “fewer.”