It’s a pet peeve of mine that many people use “less than” when describing a number of people, as in, “less than 10 people were able to attend”.
I’m not sure what the rule is for using fewer vs. less than, but my annoy-o-metre goes whacky when I hear less than in that context. I believe it should be “fewer than 10 people”.
Can anyone clarify the rule for me?
Thanks.
“Fewer” refers more often to things that can be counted (calories, shoes, items in your shopping cart).
“Less” quantifies what cannot be counted (love, intelligence, money).
Saying 'Fewer people than you think know less than you :eek: ’ would be rude, so I mention it only to show both expressions in one sentence.
I’m surprised you get so annoyed by this. My annoyance-meter goes off with bad spelling! 
While Cruel Butterfly gives the right answer, his (her?) examples may skew the picture.
Fewer is used with “count” nouns; less with “mass” nouns. “Fewer than ten representatives supported the proposal, which would have exempted quantities of less than five pounds of flour, sugar, and other kitchen staples from the proposed tax.”
If you can identify single discrete objects, the quantity of which you’re comparing, use “fewer.” If the substance you are referencing a smaller quantity of is not comprised of single macroscopic objects but comes in quantities, “less” is the appropriate word.
Ten is less than eleven. Anything wrong with that?
-FrL-
Both the media and the advertising industry get this wrong all the time, and it drives me batshit. In the supermarket checkout line, the “10 items or less” sign has always bugged me, even as a kid. Note to Wegman’s- thankyouthankyouthankyou- your signs say “10 items or fewer”. Mad props.
Amstel Light used to (still may?) advertise as “a third less calories than your regular beer”. It’s “a third fewer calories”, numbnuts. Maybe “a third of the calorie content in your regular beer” would work, but it’s cumbersome.
“Fewer” often sounds wrong, but only because people are so used to hearing “less” so often. If companies and the media actually spoke properly, it wouldn’t sound wrong.
Nope – “a third less calories” is correct. The nutritional value of a foodstuff is not measured in discrete countable objects, but in dietary calories (=Kilocalories in physics). They could be measured in horsepower or B.T.U.'s, or fractions of the estimated R.D.A. for a brontosaurus, and it wouldn’t change the actual value represented, just the numbers used to describe it.
A dozen eggs is 12 eggs,14 base 8, 1100 base 2, B base 16, but however written it’s 3 groups of 4 eggs. Ten pounds of sugar is 4.54 KG, 0.089 long hundredweight, 0.714 stone. You can have fewer than a dozen eggs, but less than 10 pounds of sugar. And calories are a unit of measure, like the yard, meter, foot, pound, kilogram, coulomb, gallon, litre, hectare, etc.
This issue was hashed out less than a month ago in the IMHO thread The latest on the less than/fewer than front.
Nothing – but ten items are fewer than eleven items.
Huh? Really? I’m not sure I follow. If calories are a unit of measure, like say gallons, then OK. Are you saying I should say “I bought 10 less gallons of gas today than I did last week”, as opposed to “I bought 10 fewer gallons…”?
And if so, why would the exception apply only to units of measure? I don’t see the distinction between “I bought 10 fewer gallons of gas”, which is evidently wrong, and “I bought 10 fewer Slim Jims”, which is right.
Am I the numbnuts??? Nooooo! 
In your example, I would say, “I bought 10 gallons less than I did last week.”
If I said, “I have less than 10 gallons of gas in my tank,” this would imply that I might have 9.9 gallons, or 9.5 gallons, or 3.25 gallons, or any amount less than 10. If I said, “I have fewer than 10 gallons of gas in my tank,” this would imply that I might have 9 gallons, or 8, or 7, but that gallons of gas are discrete units.
Then the rule that is being adduced to justify the less than/fewer than distinction being pushed here is not actually universally applicable. In other words, people are claiming the rule governs the usage, when in fact by their own admission it does not.
There is some other rule they must be following instead. I wonder what rule it is.
-FrL-
No.
10 is less than 11 because 10 and eleven are real numbers. The numbers are the subject and object. 10.52 is also less than 11.
10 **items ** is fewer than 11 items. Because now items have become the object and subject. You can’t have 10.52 items.
This can’t be right.
I’ve seen signs in the grocery store that say “10 items or less,” which sounds fine to me.
Maybe your dialect has a different rule about this than mine.
This rule about subjects and objects is different than the rule that was originally given on this thread. You’ve just made my point for me.
Also, you can have 10.52 items, I’m not sure why you are saying you can’t.
-FrL-
This doesn’t answer the question.
But the bolded sentences above are not the sentences we were discussing. The question was whether it is supposedly correct to say “less gallons of gas” and supposedly incorrect to say “fewer gallons of gas”, according to Polycarp (if I’m interpreting Polycarp’s post correctly), even though gallons are countable units. I submit that gallons, or any unit of measure, should follow the same rule as everything else. Countable units use ‘fewer’, and quantities use “less”.
Those signs that read “10 items or less” are less correct than the signs at, say, Target that read “10 items or fewer”.
The rule I gave is a highly simplified way of explaining it. It works when someone with only a basic understanding of grammar and syntax asks for an explanation as to why “less carbs” is non-standard English and “less time” is standard English.
According to this website, it’s not a hard and fast rule of grammar anyway. It’s just standard vs. non-standard usage. It may vary by dialect. I’ve never researched it that deeply, but I’d wager that in formal writing, there is only one “right” way of doing it.
If I have ten glasses of water, and you have eleven glasses of water (assume all glasses are filled to the top), I have fewer glasses than you, and I also have less water than you. If each glass holds a pint, then I have fewer pints of water, but I still have less water. If (for some unknown reason) an establishment wanted to limit incoming people to no more than ten glasses of water, the proper wording of the sign would be “ten glasses or fewer”. If the sign painter wanted to be unnecessarily cumbersome, it could be worded “the amount of water that would fit into ten glasses or less”. The “or less” refers to “amount” (uncountable), not to “ten glasses” (countable).
Because “item” means a discreet object. It is one whole something, not a unit of measure. An item exists, or it doesn’t. A half-full can of paint, and an apple core are each examples of one item. A fractional item can’t exist.
If you cut one item into two pieces representing 48 and 52% of the origional, then vaporized the 48% bit into oblivion, you’d be left with one item. The fact that the new item was cut from part of the old item does not make it a partial item.
The waters only get muddied when a unit of measure IS conventionally used as a discreet count. An example that comes to mind is the fact that paint is often sold in one gallon containers. Since a gallon is a unit of measure, you can certainly have a fraction of a gallon.
If one room requires 4-3/4 gallons of paint, then you can paint the room with a little less than 5 gallons, but you better not buy fewer than 5 gallons when you go to Sherman Williams to buy paint.
I guess this might be right for formal written language (the signs at Target). However, I still would like to claim that, spoken, both would be equally correct.