Less may be More, but it is not Fewer

Really, I insist. We must all try never to confuse the terms 'less' and 'fewer'.

We may have less trouble, we may make fewer mistakes: but we cannot properly say that we have fewer trouble, or that we make less mistakes. We may drink less beer, or fewer glasses of wine: but we cannot properly say that we drink fewer beer, or less glasses of wine.

The term 'less' refers to amount and to things that you can't count, such as oil or beer or rain or hope or porridge; 'fewer' refers to things that can be counted, such as biscuits or your toes or sheep or members of parliament. Fewer coins in the pocket, less money in the bank. Less rain, fewer rainy days.

I have just looked this up in my ancient and ancestral 1926 edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage. I am interested to see that he regards the distinction I am trying to make as a "modern tendency", but one that he believes "makes for precision" and that "should be complied with".

My old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1955 says that equating 'less' with 'fewer' is "now regarded as incorrect". Half a century on, the edition of 2007* labels it as "non-standard". So if you want to be old-fashioned or eccentric, feel free to ignore this article; but those who prefer to be up-to-date may as well conform !

* Those of us who have become close friends of the older SOED may find the modern one a little less human, rather too rigid or mechanical, and in some ways less informative. The old edition would tell us, for instance, that 'reminiscential' and 'aberrancies' first appeared in print in 1646, so that we can track them down to Sir Thomas Browne's entertaining Pseudodoxia Epidemica; whereas the twenty-first century edition coldly labels the words as 'M17 ' as though they were points on a motorway. The older edition is generous with quotes** from all periods of English literature: the modern one prefers to cite modern authors. Presumably this is so as to show us helpfully how the terms are used today; but something of the 'historicity' of words is lost.

** The old SOED does not recognise this rather sloppy use of the word 'quote' as a noun, though the new one does.

Less may be More, but it's not Fewer