Talk:different

Different than

This usage note (that isn't a ===Usage notes===) is just strange. I can almost understand what it is trying to convey about British English, but, not quite. "Expressed elliptically"? Indeed. --Connel MacKenzie T C 13:29, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I cleaned it up ([1]). Clearer? Rod (A. Smith) 23:41, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

More different than?

I believe that when used in the different than form, the adjective becomes incomparable, and thus it does not make sense to say more different than. WilliamKF 23:13, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Different than

Can anyone explain to me how "different than" is ever correct? It's not a comparative word, is it? (The entry itself says "more different" is the comparative form.) And if it is, what is the superlative form? Difestent? --Buddy13 01:29, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Plenty of illogical, traditionally incorrect things in English are now acceptable through widespread usage. Equinox ◑ 19:56, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Not everything that's in widespread usage is correct, though. It would potentially be useful (for those learning English) to clarify the different variants. "Different than" is widespread and accepted in less well-educated circles in the US but not common otherwise. "Different to" is correctly claimed to be in widespread usage but still makes the speaker appear thick as a plank. I take exception to saying that "different to" is more common in the UK, as the entry implies that it's somehow more correct. "Different from", "Similar to". Easy. 121.73.213.68

Re: "Not everything that's in widespread usage is correct, though": Of course it is, at least by any sensible definition of "correct". The only source of linguistic correctness is common usage. —Ruakh_TALK 03:33, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

In my mind, when visualising "difference" there are two forms that I might want to use:

different than, which is essentially scalar. Two quantities A and B are being compared. A is different than B merely says they are different. As a British English speaker that sounds the least elegant to me, but there you go.

different from, where A different from B to me suggests A <- B, and that B is a basis for the comparison. This is then a vector, with directionality of comparison. Illuminatusds (talk) 10:37, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Usage note: "different from" more common in US?

See edit: [2]. Can we confirm and/or source this? In my experience the British usage is nearly always "different from", whereas Americans often prefer "than". Equinox ◑ 14:25, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

In Ngrams, "different from" is by far the commonest for both US English and British English. Second place is "different than" in the US and "different to" in Britain. Of course, this includes sentences which are irrelevant to the question because "from/than/to" refer to something else (as in "he said something different to me"). But the margin is nevertheless big enough to show that "different from" is predominant in American writing. It may be otherwise in colloquial speech. --- For what it's worth, I think that "different than", though it may well have developed on its own, was reinforced in the US by German "anders als", Dutch "anders dan". 92.218.236.121 11:59, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

 Done The challenged statement seems to be gone now anyway. Equinox ◑ 14:27, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

not different

Don't say that one thing is ‘not different’ from another. If two things are alike, you can say that one thing is no or not much/very different from the other.
https://www.wordreference.com/EnglishUsage/different

--Backinstadiums (talk) 10:43, 24 December 2019 (UTC)