This week, let's discuss less and fewer as in "less than ten years' experience"? What a confluence of issues is represented by this tiny phrase: spoken versus written English; rules of grammar flouted so often that most people had forgotten them just when grocery stores finally conceded; and the age-old battle between count and noncount nouns. How fabulous! Let's dig in.
First, the rule: less is for noncount nouns, fewer is for count; much is for noncount nouns, many is for count. Count nouns are nouns representing items you can count, such as knives and spoons, and noncount nouns describe things that come in mass quantities that you cannot count, such as water, time, food, and-get this-money.
A good test for whether a noun is count or noncount is to ask "How many _____ do you have?" If the question makes sense, and you can answer it with a number, you have a count noun. "How many knives do you have? Ten." Knives is a count noun. "How many money do you have? Seven." Um, no. That does not make sense. Money is actually a noncount noun, even though people count their money all the time! What they are really counting is dollars, and dollars is a count noun.
Now let's put "fewer" and "less" in there. "I have fewer knives than spoons," but "I have less time than money." Fewer pennies = less money. Many mouths = less food.
"Less than ten years' experience" is a difficult phrase because it contains both a count noun, "years," and a noncount noun, "experience." How many years? Ten. But how much experience? Well, ten years' worth of experience. This phrase is describing an amount of a noncount noun, experience, so less is the correct word.
So what is the deal with the grocery stores? They used to have signs over one lane that said "Ten items or less." Grammatically astute shoppers over the years wrote in so many complaints that many, if not all, grocery stores have changed the signs to read "Ten items or fewer." Meanwhile, in the spoken language, we routinely say things like "Describe your qualifications for the job in 50 words or less," and "You may enter the amusement park ride in groups of five or less." The Gregg Reference Manual, which I must thank for those last two examples, even goes so far as to say that even though fewer would be correct in these situations, less is more often used, and that in casual writing or speech-such as in grocery stores!-less sounds better.
The upshot of this conflicting information is that the formal rules disagree with colloquial, spoken English, but in formal writing you must still follow the rules. Fewer and fewer people will notice, however, if you get less wrong.
About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Essentials of Access 2000" and "Editing with MS Word 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
Want help with a grammar issue? Email us your troubles and we'll turn Jennie loose!
I have been researching this topic for several hours now and, although there is more that can be written on the subject, I found the above one of the most succinct and accurate explanations.
Another example I have come across is "I have less than twenty dollars in my pocket" (correct, unless it is referring to individual dollar bills - twenty dollars is used as a single reference amount). I also liked: "Less means 'not as much [as]'. Fewer means 'not as many [as]'."
Posted by: Bruce | July 07, 2009 at 08:50 PM