2 more words that are misused (and are driving me insane)

Last month I talked about the words NUMBER and AMOUNT. Today I'm going to talk about some similar words that get confused. 

These words are FEWER and LESS.

I say they are similar to the previouys words because the same rules apply. So many people will say something like,

 'There were LESS people at the match this week than last week.'

This is WRONG. In this case, it should be FEWER.

Just as NUMBER refers to things we count, like people, goals, sheep in a flock, minutes in an hour, items in a shopping trolley etc., so FEWER also refers to those things.

FEWER is a digital word. It refers to things we COUNT.

LESS refers to things we MEASURE. Thus we would have something like,

There is LESS snow today than the same time last year.

or There is less flour in this cake than that one.

BUT There are fewer eggs in this cake than that one.

We MEASURE the flour, but we COUNT the eggs.

Please leave a comment on this post. I love hearing from you, and reblogging would help get the message across to more people and save me from continually shouting at the TV and radio.