The alt.usage.english FAQ   

• "less" vs "fewer"

  (Usage Disputes)
  
  The rule usually encountered is: use "fewer" for things you count (individually), and "less" for things you measure: "fewer apples", "less water". Since "less" is also used as an adverb ("less successful"), "fewer" helps to distinguish "fewer successful professionals" (fewer professionals who are successful) from "less successful professionals" (professionals who are less successful). (No such distinction is possible with "more", which serves as the antonym of both "less" and "fewer".)
  
  "Less" has been used in the sense of "fewer" since the time of King Alfred the Great (9th century), and is still common in that sense, especially informally in the U.S.; but in British English it became so rare that the 1st edition of the OED (in a section prepared in 1902) gave no citation more recent than 1579 and gave the usage label "Now regarded as incorrect." The 2nd edition of the OED added two 19th-century citations, and changed the usage label to "Frequently found but generally regarded as incorrect."
  
  Fowler mentioned it only in passing, and cited no real examples. In a section whose main intent was to disparage "less" in the sense "smaller" or "lower", he wrote: "It is true that _less_ and _lesser_ were once ordinary comparatives of _little_ [...] and that therefore they were roughly equivalent in sense to our _smaller_ [...]. The modern tendency is so to restrict _less_ that it means not _smaller_, but _a smaller amount of_, is the comparative rather of _a little_ than of _little_, and is consequently applied only to things that are measured by amount and not by size or quality or number, nouns with which _much_ and _little_, not _great_ and _small_, nor _high_ and _low_, nor _many_ and _few_, are the appropriate contrasted epithets: _less butter, courage_; but _a smaller army, table_; _a lower price, degree_; _fewer opportunities, people_. Plurals, and singulars with _a_ or _an_, will naturally not take _less_; _less tonnage_, but _fewer ships_; _less manpower_, but _fewer men_ [...]; though a few plurals like _clothes_ and _troops_, really equivalent to singulars of indefinite amount, are exceptions: _could do with less troops_ or _clothes_."
  
  Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1934), gave the usage label "now incorrect, according to strict usage, except with a collective; as, to wear _less_ clothes." Of the panelists for The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975), 76% said that they observed "less"/"fewer" distinction in speech, and 85% in writing. The editors noted: "even those panelists who have not observed the distinction in the past now regard it as a useful precept to bear in mind in the future."
  
  Partisans of "fewer" use "one car fewer" rather than "one fewer car", and "far fewer" rather than "much fewer".
  
  Source: [Mark Israel, 'Usage Disputes: "less" vs "fewer"', The alt.usage.english FAQ file,(line 1897), (29 Sept 1997)]
  
  NOTE: This page is under revision.
  
  

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