Are you going to make less or fewer grammar mistakes after hearing this episode?

There's only one way to find out!

Grammar Girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide

to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

This week I'll help you figure out when to use less and when to use fewer, even in the

tricky cases.

And then we'll look at where we get all the fun names for our different fingers.

Let's get started!

If you want a simple rule, the difference between less and fewer is straightforward.

The traditional advice is that fewer is for things you can count, and less is for things

you don't count.

So you can count M&Ms, glasses of water, and potatoes.

So maybe you eat fewer M&Ms, serve fewer glasses of water, and buy fewer potatoes for the

salad.

But you can't count candy, water, or potato salad.

So you eat less candy, observe that the lake has less water, and make less potato salad

for the next potluck.

As I said, that's the simple rule, and the one you'll hear most often.

Another way to think about the difference that also takes care of some of the exceptions

to the simple rule is to use less for singular nouns and fewer for plural nouns.

The Chicago Manual of Style recommends using the singular or plural framework as do I.

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