Is that different from or different than?
by Laura Hale Brockway, ELS
I’m hoping my readers can help me out on this one. This week, my associate editor and I disagreed about using different from versus different than. Here is the sentence:
“Physician surveys have shown that primary care physicians in rural areas have a notably different work experience than primary care physicians in urban settings.”
My associate editor insisted that different than is always wrong and different from should be used. I argued that different than makes better sense in the sentence. A quick check of the rules on the usage of these phrases was equally confusing.
Here’s what I found from the web site Grammatically Correct:
“When to Use different from
Use different from for simple comparisons, as in comparing two persons or things.
Example: My car is different from (not than) her car.
When using different from, the two things being compared (e.g. my car and her car in the first example) should have the same grammatical structure. This is called parallel construction. Here is an example:
Example: People in the field of literature write differently from people in the field of business.
When different than is acceptable
Because of increased use, different than is sometimes considered acceptable in American English. When in doubt, just use different from, as it is preferred by most people. According to the American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel (1992), different than is acceptable only if the words following different than make up a clause — especially if the clause is elliptical (referring to an aforementioned context without restating it). Here’s an example:
Example: It seems so different than Paris.”
Additionally, many style books — including Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Bernstein’s The Careful Writer — argue against using different than. According to these sources, different from is preferred and considered correct, but different than is considered acceptable on some occasions.
In our example, different and than are separated in the sentence. Should that make a difference when applying the rules?
So, readers . . . what would you do. Should this sentence use different from or different than? Here it is again:
“Physician surveys have shown that primary care physicians in rural areas have a notably different work experience than primary care physicians in urban settings.”
