Recently, an Insider reader shared her pet peeve with the Grammarnatrix: people incorrectly using the words less and fewer. She confided that she becomes especially annoyed in the supermarket checkout line when she reads the sign, “Express Lane – 12 items or less.” The reader implored the Grammarnatrix to share the grammar rules with the Insider audience (and perhaps the supermarket managers).
The Grammarnatrix understands why this bothers the reader so much – because it’s a simple rule: when you’re referring to a count noun use the word fewer; when you’re referring to a mass noun use the word less.
Let’s explain. A count noun is something you can count. As the Grammarnatrix looks around her living room and see piles, she can count them. She says to herself, “I wish I had fewer piles.”
A mass noun deals with something you can’t count inpidually. As the Grammarnatrix looks around her living room and sees sunshine coming through the windows, she says to herself, “If my living room had less sunshine the plants wouldn’t thrive.” Also, a mass noun wouldn’t be plural. You wouldn’t say, “If my living room had less sunshines. . .”
So these are the basic rules that, if followed, will lead you to speak correctly. However, there will be times, my friends, when you run into words that could be either count nouns or mass nouns. In these situations, figure out if your noun can be counted or not, apply the correct word and you’ll be fine.
Naturally, there are exceptions to these rules and it would behoove you to memorize them. Even though we count money, distance and time – and you would assume you’d use the term fewer – it is actually traditional to use the term less. For example, you would say, “her speech was less than seven minutes,” or “the babysitter was paid $10 less than the nanny.”
The Grammarnatrix has a trick for you to remember when to use each word. The words less and mass both end with s. Count and fewer both have 5 letters.
So there you have it. And to acknowledge our reader’s pet peeve, she is correct about the sign in the supermarket check-out lane; it should read, “12 items or fewer.”
