Less and Fewer

fewer (superlative fewest)

The comparative of few; a smaller number.

Fewer women wear hats these days.
There are fewer tigers than there were a hundred years ago.



Some [1] regard the use of the determiner less with quantities to be incorrect, stating that less should indicate only a reduction in size or significance, leaving fewer to indicate a smaller quantity:

Their troubles are fewer than ours, meaning "Their troubles are not so numerous as ours."
Their troubles are less than ours, meaning "Their troubles are not so great as ours."

In typical usage this distinction is absent, and less has been widely understood and commonly used as a synonym to fewer since it first appeared in Old English, compare læs.
[edit] Translations



****
Learners of English often stumble over when to use ‘less’ and ‘fewer’.
ONE of my students recently inquired about a scholarship programme because the rules requested that applicants write an essay of 500 words or fewer. The requirement piqued her curiosity, and it stemmed from my composition course and our practice with concise, brief endings to a film critique format. My written instructions asked for a summary in 100 words or less, implying the use of fewer paragraphs than sentences.
Confusing? You bet it is, not to mention frustrating; learners of English often stumble here. I suggested that the class ponder this mystery together: which of the two forms is correct and, conversely, which is incorrect? We will see in the following examples that the choice (of usage) is really not as frightful as it seems.

We hauled out two well-thumbed tomes, Webster’s and the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, and found that they agree that the word fewer refers to the number of things counted. The latter says that: “The traditional rule holds that fewer is used with expressions denoting things that can be counted (fewer than four players), while less is used with mass terms denoting things of measurable extent (less paper, less than a gallon of paint)”(p675).
But before we can exclaim, Aha! and pat ourselves on the back, there is more: “How­­ever, less is idiomatic in certain constructions where fewer would occur according to the traditional rule. Less than is used before a plural noun that denotes a measure of time, amount, or distance: less than three weeks; less than $400; less than 100km. Less is sometimes used with plural nouns in the expressions no less than (as in No less than 30 of his colleagues signed the letter) and or less.”
The idiomatic usage in place of the rule is supported by Theodore M. Bernstein in The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage in which he states that the whole must be considered, not merely the sum of its parts: “For instance: ‘Not many of these buildings are fewer than 30 years old.’ The thought here is not of individual years, but of a period of time; therefore, less. Another example: ‘Some professors earn fewer than $7,500 a year.’ Make it less. The thought is not of separate dollars but of a sum of money” (Bernstein, p184).
So, my classroom instructions were on the money (exactly right). But we don’t want to forget old Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, presently an acting doorstop. When we find the page we also discover that it upholds the traditional rule with one exception: “It is not accurate for all usage ... less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so” (592).
It would appear that both our samples are correct and, as with much of our language, proper usage is in the eye, or mouth, of the beholder. Fewer may be the proper choice for an essay whereas less would work just fine for a supermarket checkout line. Even so, less is the more versatile of the two.
Depending on the usage, less can be three of the four parts of speech. As a noun: He received less than he anticipated; as an adjective: This Christmas I had less time to spend with friends; and as an adverb: She is less happy. Also, as a synonym of minus it can act as a preposition: Ten minus eight is two. But fewer can only be an adjective, we discovered, as it is the comparative form of few. Getting into the spirit of the thing, the playfulness of the language, one student said: ‘For parts of speech one can say that fewer has less but less is more!’ I like it, perhaps because according to Webster, a native speaker’s ear should be their guide in choosing the correct usage. But what of academic language? Webster’s has this to say:
“The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great ... more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language.
“After about 900 years, Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker’s lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated” (p593).
It would seem that we are less likely to see one term predominant than we are to see their continued usage as interchangeable and with no fewer contradictions than those of the past. I have encouraged my students to keep their eyes peeled for further examples of entanglement in English.
Steven Mooney is a lecturer at the Emirates College for Advanced Education, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.