# Different from, to or than?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/different-from-to-or-than/809843>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [March 1, 2018, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/different-from-to-or-than/809843 "2018-03-01T18:13:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Noel\_Prosequi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b19c9b/32.png) [@Noel\_Prosequi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noel_Prosequi)\
**Post date:** [March 4, 2018, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/different-from-to-or-than/809843/21 "2018-03-04T21:16:33Z")

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> [@Riemann](#):
>
> What about your degree in English allows you to deduce this?
> 
> The choice of preposition “from” vs “to” is completely arbitrary. It’s possible to defend some variants in English as superior on various grounds, but not here. Nothing but consensus usage could possibly govern which is correct.
> 
> I agree that it is “from”, but only in the sense that this is empirically supported as (overwhelmingly) the most common usage. If usage drifts in the future to make “to” a more common variant, why do you imagine that some “battle” must be waged?

Not arbitrary. My Year 7 teacher explained it thus. The root Latin word for “differ” and hence “different” is essentially the same as that for diverge, deviate (as a verb), etc. it contains a sense of separation, of moving away. Logically, you can’t move away “to” something that you’re moving away “from”. It’d be like saying you’re separating “to” your wife, or that two cars on the highway diverged “to” each other.

Data point-Australia, 1971.

Perhaps the “to” form is an elision of phrases of the form “X is different compared to Y”. While some might prefer “with” in that usage, it is not illogical to use “to” as a preposition to follow comparison, because comparison requires bringing things together, conceptually at least. But if you ditch the word “compared”, perhaps out of a sense that it is unnecessarily verbose, you get “different to”.

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**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\
**Post date:** [March 4, 2018, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/different-from-to-or-than/809843/22 "2018-03-04T23:24:17Z")

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> [@Noel\_Prosequi](#):
>
> Not arbitrary. My Year 7 teacher explained it thus. The root Latin word for “differ” and hence “different” is essentially the same as that for diverge, deviate (as a verb), etc. it contains a sense of separation, of moving away. Logically, you can’t move away “to” something that you’re moving away “from”. It’d be like saying you’re separating “to” your wife, or that two cars on the highway diverged “to” each other.

That’s interesting. It seems to me that this suggests a reasonable account of what may be happening.

In the case of _diverge_, it can still literally mean “move away” or “move apart” in modern English. And I think that we would surely never say _divergent to_ when using it to mean physically moving away/apart. But _divergent to_ is still common, at about 10% the frequency of _divergent from_ according to google ngram, presumably when it means “not the same as”.

Unlike _divergent_, in modern English _different_ no longer retains the sense of its etymological root. And I don’t think its etymology is in the forefront of most people’s minds, i.e. the original metaphor of “moving apart” is lost - in modern English it’s now just a word that means “not the same”. So perhaps that explains why historically it was almost exclusively _different from_, but some dialects seem to be becoming more permissive of the _different to_ variant.

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