‘Different Than’ or ‘Different From’: Which Should You Say?

It is a venerable piece of stylistic and grammatical instruction that one should write or say “different from” instead of “different than” (popular in America) or “different to” (popular in Britain). How venerable? The passage below occurred in Remarks on the English Language: In the Nature of Vaugelas’s Remarks on the French, by Robert Baker, published in 1770:

“is not Englifh”: sick burn, bro.

And this is from Seth T. Hurd, A Grammatical Corrector: Or, Vocabulary of the Common Errors of Speech, 1847:

Baker and Hurd notwithstanding, there isn’t really a justification for the preference for from, other than custom and convention. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the to construction dating from 1526, from from 1590, and than from 1644. It is sometimes argued that from is preferable because we say “differs from.” But, as R.W. Burchfield points out in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage,

By this argument, all words in the same morphological family should be construed with the same prepositions: e.g. we ought to say “according with” (instead of “according to”) because we say “accords with.” Contrast also “full of” with “filled with”; “proud of” with “pride in.”

Nevertheless, from has for a long time been much more popular than than, as this Google Ngram Viewer chart shows:

The chart shows a gradual rise in different than in the 20th century. The software provides reliable data only until the year 2000; it’s been my sense that the upward slope has steepened since then, especially in spoken language, which Google Ngram Viewer does not measure. To test my impression, I looked at all the times one or the other phrasing was used on National Public Radio over roughly the last two weeks. (I included only conversations or interviews — not, that is, cases where a reporter was reading from a script.) Here’s what I found:

1. “How is this different from Nafta?”
2. “So they’re going have to find something different than what we have already seen, which I think is very unlikely because the FBI is not doing a full-on criminal investigation.”
3. “He was really angry. Is that a different side of him than we’ve seen before?”
4. “The circumstances of my attack were different from the circumstances in the book Speak.”
5. “I mean, what kinds of questions will she ask since this is different than a trial?”
6. “And that’s just such a different tone from this afternoon, which has become fiercely partisan and incredibly tense.”
7. “Very different set of circumstances from what we’re looking at today.”
8. “And that’s a very different philosophy of ruling than actually any party has had in Poland for the last 30 years.”
9.  ”Poland has a supreme court that consists of several dozen justices actually. It’s different from the U.S.”
10. “So when I see it, I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television.” (Donald Trump)
11. “So what were some of the challenges of writing a theme that were different from anything else you’d written before?”
12. “And that’s very different from Facebook.”
13. “That’s a little bit different than on Facebook or Twitter.” (No. 12 and No. 13 are from different pieces.)
14. Q: “And this is very different from what you went through.” A: “It is very different than what I went through.”
15. “On one topic — North Korea — the mood is very different from last year.”
16. “Did you have a similar experience when you worked there of North Koreans having a very different perception of their country and its economy than the rest of the world does?”
17. “So industrial engineering — that’s different from, like, product design.”
18. “I see the atmosphere in which they’re winning as entirely different from anything we’ve seen before.”
19. “In a perfect world, getting treatment for mental-health challenges would be no different than getting medical treatment for a skin rash or a bad cold or a broken leg.”
20. “I think my advice wouldn’t be any different than what he is doing.”
21. “Was he treated differently than other draft resisters, do you think?”"
22. And that’s kind of different than what we hear from older Republicans.”
23. “… Bert and Ernie, when I was a kid, was this idea of two people who are so, so fundamentally different from each other but had this, like, lifelong relationship with one another.”"
24. I mean, one of the worst things of writing this book was to realize that I was not different from this guy.”
25. “Now, this is a little different than the essay from John Hockenberry, formerly of The Takeaway.”

For those keeping score at home, that’s 13 froms, 13 thans.  The exchange in No. 14 gives me a sense almost of interchangeability; the interviewer uses from and I read the interviewee’s than as a tacit comment that either one works.

Getting into the weeds a little bit, in this sample, from tended to be used (a bit) more by professional journalists and writers and educated people. From also is more popular when what follows is a simple noun or noun phrase, as in Nos. 1, 4, 6, and others. Than is more often the choice when it’s followed by a clause or more complex wording. In No. 8, we have, “different from the U.S.,” while in No. 9, “… a very different philosophy of ruling than actually any party has had in Poland for the last 30 years.”

The clincher is that both Nos. 8 and 9 were said by the same highly literate person, the historian Anne Applebaum. In any case, it’s clear to me: different than is approaching, if it hasn’t already reached, the promised land of respectability.