I have to admit that I am biased toward supermarkets. I don’t drive, so it’s awfully convenient to have most all of the food products I regularly consume under a single roof. Furthermore, the variety in the average supermarket is a fascinating testament to the opulence of our modern society — the Ralphs nearest my apartment stocks no fewer than 15 types of canned pastas, including my dear ABCs and 123s, a meal that I find both educational and nostalgic. Such benefits allow me to overlook the flaws in the supermarket system.
Others are less willing to cut supermarkets such slack. Oddly, though, instead of concerning themselves with real supermarket problems, like the preponderance of Whitney Houston songs on the PAs, they’re obsessed with the check-out line:
Alas, it’s not merely fictional superheroes who are interested in the name of the express lane, but real live people. Both in defense of my friends the supermarkets and for the sake of my sanity, which wears ever thinner every time bad prescriptivism goes unchallenged, let me explain why “10 items or less” is acceptable.
Here’s the claim that agitated prescriptivists stake: less is restricted to uncountable items, and fewer is restricted to countable items. (Uncountable, or mass, items are those like milk, money, mortar; countable items are those like coins, cups, kitties.) That is why an Ideal Boy says things like:
(1a) You need to drink less pop and more milk.
(1b) You need to eat fewer sweets and more brussels sprouts.
(Statements like these are the reason that an Ideal Boy has few friends.) Now, what’s interesting about this is that swapping less for fewer is not too bad, while using fewer for less sounds quite terrible, at least to me:
(2a) *You need to drink fewer soda.
(2b) You need to eat less sweets.
My intuition is borne out on the Internet:
Google hits for | less X | fewer X |
Y stuff | 369,000 | 516 |
Y objects | 17,200 | 27,100 |
So the idea that fewer is limited to countable items is pretty well borne out by usage. However, we can see that less is less stringently affiliated with uncountables. (Language Log has even more data on this.) So is this a sign of that horror of horrors, the destruction of the English language by modern speakers who can’t be bothered to learn the rules of the grammar?
Unsurprisingly, no. As it turns out, this whole notion that fewer is countable and less is uncountable has been traced back to 1770 by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. And it wasn’t a rule back then, but rather a preference of a single author, Robert Baker. (That’s not to say that no one agreed with him, only that no one else seems to have put it in print back then.) So it’s not that modern ne’er-do-wells are ruining the language; at worst, they’re returning it to an earlier state. The OED attests countable less in 1481, derived from an Old English usage attested by no less a personage than King Alfred.
All right. So less used to be fine with countables. Then a dude came along and said he wasn’t fond of that, and his opinion eventually got codified into a rule. But, as MWDEU and the Google results point out, countable less remains common, despite the widespread acceptance of this rule outlawing it. Now, to me, that suggests that the rule that less can’t be used with count nouns is spurious.
You’re welcome to disagree; you may be of the opinion that the fact that a large proportion of the populace believes this rule exists makes it exist. (It’s like the principle of common usage, but in reverse.) That’s a (sort of) reasonable stance, but I don’t think that accepting this rule rules out 10 items or less.
Countability is gradient. Arnold Zwicky has written extensively on this issue on Language Log. In different situations, the same noun can be countable or uncountable. Anecdotally, I sometimes say “I got some email” (uncountable) while at other times I say “I got some emails” (countable). But also, in some situations, it can be unclear whether a usage is countable or uncountable. For example, let’s say you want to discuss the calamitous effect that the current economic downturn has had on your salary:
(3a) I’m making four thousand dollars less than last year.
(3b) ?I’m making four thousand dollars fewer than last year.
Dollars sure looks like countable here, modified as it is by a number and a plural suffix. But I don’t think anyone’s going to argue (3b) is better than (3a) — unless they’ve drunk an awful lot of Robert Baker’s Kool-Aid. Why’s that? Probably because we’re not thinking of the individual dollars in the $4000, but rather as the money as a mass. The MWDEU mentions that this same situation holds for a variety of seemingly countable nouns, such as distance, units of time, and statistics. Now let’s return to the or less/fewer construction, for these sorts of nouns:
(4a) Having trimmed my caloric intake, I now eat seven pounds or less of avocados each day.
(4b) ?Having trimmed my caloric intake, I now eat seven pounds or fewer of avocados each day.
Again, I prefer the less sentence to the fewer sentence. That means that a seemingly countable noun can take or less if it can be thought of as a mass or as a single unit. That’s why 10 items or less can be acceptable. Clearly the objects being taken into the checkout can be thought of as a mass noun — namely, groceries. You can say I bought some groceries, but you can’t say I bought a grocery, unless you mean you’ve bought a store. Because groceries are commonly regarded as a mass, it’s not really weird to say “10 items or less”, and not much weirder than saying “10 pounds or less” or “10 gallons or less”.
Finally, it turns out that “X items or less” was actually quite commonplace before the grocery stores started using it. For instance, in Google Books, there are 13 full-text hits for “items or less” before 1950. (To be fair, some of them are repetitions of a legal phrase, but there’s still a few unique hits.) Take a guess how many full-text hits there are for “items or fewer” before 1950. Now, check your guess. Pretty damning, eh?
Summary: The idea that less can’t be used with count nouns isn’t well supported; it’s a rule that hasn’t ever been strictly followed, especially for count nouns that can be perceived as masses. Groceries lend themselves to perception as a mass, so it’s no surprise that “10 items or less” is favored now, just as it has been historically. Please stop complaining about this.
37 comments
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September 30, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Liz G
I have returned to make my second comment! I have to say I am considerably irked by “10 items or less,” although I didn’t give it much thought previously. But I definitely see your point that this usage has become popularly accepted. I love how well researched your entries are, by the way.
If we have a choice between “fewer” and “less,” why is there no choice for the alternative, “more”?
September 30, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Liz G
I have returned to make my second comment! Although I had not given it much thought, the whole “10 items or less” phrase has irked me in the past. But I definitely see your point that this usage has become popularly accepted. I love how well-researched your entries are, including the creative use of Google!
Man, it’s really uncanny how you sound almost like an English major now. ;)
September 30, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The Ridger
It’s one of those things that sounds like it should make so much sense, but on closer examination doesn’t, because language isn’t math.
September 30, 2008 at 6:15 pm
John
Wow, Tesco is coming under criticism from linguists? Who are these linguists and how did they get people to pay attention to them?
October 1, 2008 at 2:19 am
The Ridger
They aren’t linguists. They’re peeveologists. And they write letters to their papers and complain loudly in stores.
October 1, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Jonathon
Liz G: I think you’ve got it backwards. It used to be popularly accepted until someone spontaneously decided a couple centuries ago that it was wrong, and the idea that less is an error has been spreading ever since.
Gabe: That date for the King Alfred citation should actually be 888, not 1481 (that’s from the next entry in the definition, from Caxton).
But I think I have to disagree with this line of reasoning: “a seemingly countable noun can take or less if it can be thought of as a mass or as a single unit. That’s why 10 items or less can be acceptable.” How does that explain phrases like “25 words or less”? It’s clearly not “25 words or some amount that is less than that.” I’d have to say that this use of less is simply idiomatic.
October 2, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Liz G
Oh yes, I did have it backwards. I reread the Robert Baker paragraph and see the distinction.
I accidentally said “less decisions” today!
October 8, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Trying to show the way
I say “10 items or fewer” and -rarely- a supermarket has the sign this way.
Your entire article is off base however because it is items that are at issue, not groceries in general. There is no confusion whether items are countable and not a mass described by a scalar number c.f. dollars.
Mandarin Chinese and probably other languages has a complex system of particles that are used in counting different kinds of things, as well as a more general particle ge.
October 9, 2008 at 5:21 pm
John
Even if you think the phrase applies to a count noun, the point remains that “less” has been used with count nouns for a long long time, by writers who presumably knew what they were doing. I have some examples, including the King Alfred one: http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/07/less-fewer.html
February 28, 2009 at 10:56 am
Less or fewer? « Sentence first
[…] Fellow Merriam-Webster readers Arrant Pedantry, Language Log and Motivated Grammar have written very interesting posts about the less-fewer […]
July 27, 2009 at 8:30 pm
andrew
language, lexicography and linguistics all develop over time. in the 1600’s “ye” was written instead of “the” but you dont watch anyone other than the eccentric saying “ye” nowadays. the same applies to less and fewer. Nothing is ever perfect at first it takes development over time to iron out the imperfections in language hence why fewer should be used for countable objects.
April 5, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Tom S. Fox
Gabe, you are not going to like what Weird Al Yankovic did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGWiTvYZR_w
May 29, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Chris
You’re welcome to disagree; you may be of the opinion that the fact that a large proportion of the populace believes this rule exists makes it exist. (It’s like the principle of common usage, but in reverse.) That’s a (sort of) reasonable stance, but honestly sunshine; shut up, you’re an idiot.
Currency can refer to two things: either the name of a particular currency, e.g. the British pound or the United States dollar, or (perhaps more accurately) to the notes and coins of which the the name refers to. In turn, the name ‘currency’ refers to the (abstract) monetary value of the notes and coins which circulate within a given boundary, i.e. the British pound for England, Scotland and Wales or the United States dollar for the USA. Whereas notes and coins are countable (e.g. 1 note, 2 notes, 1 coin, 2 coins etc) the value of those notes and coins is not; 1 dollar is equal to y value and 1 pound is equal to x value. One can not say the values of the dollar are X and Z, at the same time; there is only one value at at any given moment – at the moment the dollar’s value isn’t particularly high.
1 dollar = 1 dollar of currency and 1 pound = 1 pound of currency. In other words, ‘dollar’ is simply a measurement of value just like grams, metres or litres. For example: 10 thousand dollars of currency; 10 thousand grams of sugar; 10 thousand litres of milk; 10 thousand metres of land. Therefore, when one says, “I am earning 10 thousand dollars”, one is essentially saying, “I am earning 10 thousand dollars of currency of Y value”. The point is that currency is an uncountable noun just like milk, water and sugar. Hence argued in the article – it is perfectly acceptable to use the modifier ‘less’ in its presence, as in the sentence, “I am making 10 thousand dollars less than last year”.
“BUT I SAID, “10 THOUSAND DOLLARS LESS THAN LAST YEAR” NOT “10 THOUSAND DOLLARS OF CURRENCY LESS THAN LAST YEAR””.
As dollar can only refer to one (obvious) thing (i.e. the value of currency used in the USA) we don’t need to specify what we are referring to; the reference is tacitly taken care of for us. But just because we don’t mention the reference doesn’t mean it is not being referred too. It just so happens that currency falls into the category of being obvious – at least if you’re not an idiot.
“10 items or less”, on the other hand, is quite a different kettle of fish. An ‘item’ is a very ambiguous term. One could use item to refer to: a televised news item, a print news item, an item of clothing, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, an item of information… An item is quite simply unspecified until given a reference, and it is only when paired with a reference does it take on a value, and that value is always quantifiable as 1 individual thing. For example, an item of clothing quite clearly refers to 1 individual piece of clothing (a jacket, a pair of jeans, a white shirt…); a televised news item is 1 individual news story; mutatis mutandis a print news story; Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are 1 individual couple. Therefore, an item refers to an individual unspecified thing, as does 10 items to 10 unspecified things. In the context of the checkout desk, however, it is obvious that 10 items refers to a specified number of unknown but individual consumables. For example: 1 tube of toothpaste, 2 bottles of coke, 1 bag of bananas weighing 2 kgs, 1 bag of apples weighing 1.5 kgs, 3 packets of chocolate biscuites, 2 packets of spaghetti, and 1 can of tomato sauce, or in other words, 10 countable items.
It is therefore correct to say “10 items or fewer” as opposed to “10 items or less”
1 dollar, on the other hand, does not refer to 1 unspecified thing, just as 10 thousand dollars does not refer to 10 thousand unspecified things; they refer to 1 dollar of currency and 10 thousands dollars of currency respectively, and currency, which we have established is a value, is uncountable.
IDIOT. I welcome your comments.
June 1, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Kris
Chris,
“As dollar can only refer to one (obvious) thing (i.e. the value of currency used in the USA) we don’t need to specify what we are referring to. . .”
You do know that there are many countries that use “dollar” as their currency designator, right? I mean, Canada for another obvious one, but many others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#Countries_currently_using_the_dollar
In addition, you will find on that list that some independent counties use USD as an official currency besides just the United States.
September 13, 2011 at 4:45 am
StuartD
In Australia and New Zealand this is not an issue. Try telling most people down here that “ten items or less” is somehow “incorrect” and they’d think you only had the one oar in the water. And of course we are right. It is perfectly good idiomatic English. The interesting question is why peevologists always latch on to absurd non-rules that are of no significance. “Ten items or less” (and other such uses of less) is in no way ambiguous or misleading. You have to wonder sometimes whether it is because these are the only “rules” the peevologists know or can understand.
September 21, 2011 at 10:11 pm
pinesol
You seem to draw a wrong conclusion from the usage of ‘dollars’ and ‘pounds. Let’s examine this sentence: Ten years is a long time. ‘ten years’ is a countable noun, but the verb takes the singular form. It is because ‘ten years’ refers to an amount of time.
Let’s look at one of the sentences you used to justify your point: I’m making four thousand dollars less than last year. ‘four thousand dollars’ appear to be a countable noun, but it merely refers to an amount of money. It means I am making an amount of money which is less money by an amount of $4,000 than last year.
The other sentence you used also refers to an uncountable noun: Having trimmed my caloric intake, I now eat seven pounds or less of avocados each day. When you say ‘seven pounds of avocados, you are not counting the number of them. You are actually using avocados as an uncountable noun. You could have said. “I now eat seven avocados or fewer each day.”
I just wanted to pointed out that, in my estimation, you drew a wrong conclusion from a flawed analysis.
September 22, 2011 at 11:36 pm
StuartD
Pinesol, I just don’t think you get it. This is an important part of the original post that you seem to have missed:
“As it turns out, this whole notion that fewer is countable and less is uncountable has been traced back to 1770 by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. And it wasn’t a rule back then, but rather a preference of a single author, Robert Baker. (That’s not to say that no one agreed with him, only that no one else seems to have put it in print back then.) So it’s not that modern ne’er-do-wells are ruining the language; at worst, they’re returning it to an earlier state. The OED attests countable less in 1481, derived from an Old English usage attested by no less a personage than King Alfred.”
Do you understand? Forget about the details you are discussing and justify the “rule”.
Pinsol, sorry, but there is no rule of English grammar that says “less” cannot be used with countable nouns.
The history of English usage proves this and the fact that Robert Baker said that he preferred “fewer” in some circumstances doesn’t make it a rule.
Is this clear?
September 29, 2011 at 7:54 am
The Mercedes “Less Doors” Commercial « The Quick and Dirty
[…] think “one less [count noun]” works, and I’ve seen more than one grammarian defend “10 items or less” signs), but the Mercedes commercial is not one of these times. It’s not an idiom and […]
October 28, 2011 at 10:31 am
Avraham Spierer
Gabe, I love your article. I think I disagree that people consider the 10 items one item – groceries. To me the deciding and conclusive factor in this case more than just about any other is that as you approach the cashier lanes, you actually count your items to make sure you can use the express lane. There is nothing more countable than items you actually have to count.
April 25, 2012 at 12:26 am
Leah
My work involves proofreading technical papers, so I take my cues from mathematics. Since “less than” is the term used when comparing quantities, I’m going to extend that to the word “less”. Anything involving a number is going to get a “less” rather than a “fewer” from me.
July 5, 2012 at 10:06 am
Lesser Vs. Fewer | Voxy Blog
[…] By the way, that sign for the supermarket express lane that reads “10 items or less” is technically incorrect and should read “10 items or fewer” since you can count the individual items. Every so often, a grammarian will point this out but so far it’s been a losing battle. […]
September 29, 2012 at 8:38 am
Ado_Annie
Have to admit, less/few is an irritant to me and I can’t even remember which English teacher drummed into my head ‘fewer things, less than the whole.’ I don’t mind the checkout sign so much anymore, but on TV it’s really irking. TNT advertises that they have ‘less commercials.’ Are they smaller? Do they take up less space? Do they have less mass? I suppose they can take up less air time if there truly are fewer of them, but that’s a stretch since the programs in between the commercials are of a finite length and something has to fill the time to the next hour or half hour before different programming begins.
The spellcheck/grammar program on Word even flagged ‘less commercials’ and suggested ‘fewer.’ Not that I take Word’s grammar advice very often. Funny what sets us off on a tangent. I am off my soapbox now.
November 19, 2012 at 3:03 am
Joel
@andrew The y in ye isn’t actually a y at all, but a letter called thorn, which happens to look like a y. I’m no expert, but as I understand it, it was simply an abbreviation of th, so at the time of its use nobody actually said ye either; they said the, just like we do now (except when we’re erroneously saying ye in mockery of the way we think people used to talk!). They covered it on an episode of QI, I think. (If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an English show which debunks all sorts of things that everyone thinks are true, in a comedy panel show format. High-brow edutainment (wince, sorry) at its finest, and a must see for anyone who loves to be right about everything and know things that the common man does not, i.e., let’s be honest, everyone who’s commenting on an article debating the finer points of English grammar.)
January 3, 2013 at 8:50 am
Kevin
This is a great article! Initially I jumped on the bandwagon of folks upset at the sign reading “10 items or less,” however I’ve since realized that in my mind the implied requirement is “10 items OF STUFF or less STUFF.” Since stuff (or groceries) is not countable, “less” seems acceptable. In any case, it seems like we can say “fewer” is preferred, but not required. Thanks!
By the way, your article has the statement “there’s still a few unique hits,” so you might want to correct your usage of the contraction for “there is” in referring to a plural noun. I’m sure you have a blog post about Americans’ growing confusion of singular versus plural — I’ll look for that next.
May 5, 2013 at 9:03 pm
greenbean
Having been one of many adolescents brow-beaten about my “BAD GRAMMAR” in countless high school and college classes, I am very grateful to you and others like you (Language Hat & Log, and more personally my wonderful husband, Jim Salant) for showing me that I was not committing grammatical crimes in my writing, as my teachers insisted I was until I believed it, sapping all pleasure out of simply using my own ear. Thank you for furthering my re-education.
December 1, 2013 at 5:36 pm
CtK 142: Meddling the Kids | Corrupting the Kids
[…] 10 items or less lines […]
February 3, 2014 at 12:57 pm
dan chall (@danchall)
Thanks! Criticism of the supermarket signs have always struck me as misguided. I think I would never say “or less items,” but “or less” by itself, to my eye, means “or a smaller amount” and is perfectly natural to me. My Mac’s OAD is funny about this. The usage note points out that “less people” is wrong, but the example in the definition includes “a population of less than 200,000.”
February 3, 2014 at 9:38 pm
Stuart Duncan
Less and fewer are not totally interchangeable — it is not standard English to say that there is fewer water in the swimming pool, but “12 items or less” is standard. Just because many millions of people — mostly Americans — swallow the rule about “fewer” being mandatory with “countable” items doesn’t make it true. Many people with PhDs in English who live outside the US and haven’t spent time on Internet grammar sites would laugh uproariously at the notion that you must say “fewer items” rather than “less”. “Twelve or less items” sounds better than the foolish, unidiomatic, and affected “12 items or fewer”. I just can’t understand why so many people swallow a so patently stupid and bogus “rule”.
February 3, 2014 at 9:47 pm
Stuart Duncan
Dan, your Mac is American and can not be taken seriously on matters of grammar or usage. I keep coming across Americans who say there is no such word as “orientate”. There most certainly is and I and just about all other British and Non-American English speakers have used it all our lives. My pet peeve where grammar is concerned is Americans trying to push their own zombie grammar, usage and punctuation rules down the throats of everyone else. It is impossible for me to say what I think of them in honest, sober and printable language.
February 5, 2014 at 7:49 am
YSK that "10 items or less" is not actually wrong. | Awesome Facts
[…] Motivated Grammar Blog […]
February 8, 2014 at 7:41 am
You Suck
STFU. Don’t tell me how I should feel about grocery stores misusing the word “less,” you asshole.
July 21, 2014 at 1:58 pm
Less or Fewer?
[…] and “fewer hatred” are completely non-idiomatic. This is important. Not even strict descriptivists think the two words are interchangeable. Everyone agrees that “fewer” only works with […]
December 21, 2015 at 11:59 am
Gavin Hodgkinson
It’s all regurgitated. Hardly an original thought here. Poor King Alfred is mentioned in 50% of all discussions of ‘fewer’ and ‘less’. Alfred’s use of less is correct. It is a bloody noun, equivalent to a lessness. ‘worda’ is genitive plural and means ‘of words’. Alfred’s ‘læs worda’ means ‘a lessness of words’. It is the opposite of a moreness of words. Read up on your sources before you misquote them.
December 21, 2015 at 1:00 pm
Gavin Hodgkinson
“I’m sorry, Sir, you must go to the next lane. You’ve got too much items.”
December 29, 2015 at 4:11 pm
Episode 170: Word Crimes 1 – Talk the Talk
[…] It was all the preference of a single author. https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/ […]
April 7, 2016 at 7:08 pm
Paul Sullivan
Fewer sodas
June 25, 2022 at 4:07 pm
10 Wrong Grammar Rules Everyone Knows - FactsandHistory
[…] Centuries ago it started to become accepted that less would be used for items that couldn’t be counted (“I ate less food,” “There should be less contempt for my greed”) and that fewer applied to countable objects (“I ate fewer cakes,” “There should be fewer mean looks from people about the cakes I did eat”). Unfortunately, this has less to do with an actual “rule” and more to do with the preference of an author, one Robert Baker, that became widely disseminated [source: Doyle]. […]