What is than used for

Crucially the FCO stopped well short of advising against travel to France, which is the most popular holiday destination in the world and the second-most popular, after Spain, for UK holidaymakers. Had David Cameron not won an election he never expected to win, he might not have lost a referendum he never expected to lose.

The African turquoise killifish has one of the shortest lifespans of all vertebrates: it reaches the ripe old age of only three to twelve months. Chances are that too much information running through our small brains clouds our thinking, making it more difficult to do our jobs. On the other hand, given that these references are too obvious, they may have been intentionally included to insinuate a Kemalist junta rather than a Gulenist one. Real-time suggestions, wherever you write.

To vs. And also in hardly had I explained it than and scarcely had I explained it than. So when did this pair get so confusing? Turns out they've always been that way. Linguistically speaking, they're identical twins. In Middle English, they were the same word; both spellings were used for all the various meanings. It's been a few hundred years, however, since English has treated them as distinct, which means we have to too.

We could go back to Middle English, but we think that would be harder then—um, that is, harder than —mastering these. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. What to Know Than is used in comparisons as a conjunction as in "she is younger than I am" and as a preposition "he is taller than me".

More Words At Play. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Oct. Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms. Time Traveler. George Zipf, a 20th-Century US linguist and philologist, expounded the principle of least effort. He predicted that short and simple words would be the most frequent — and he was right. Perhaps it was the only one of the match? Or maybe it was the clincher that won the league? Context very often determines sense. There are many exceptions regarding the use of the definite article, for example in relation to proper nouns.

Yet Rosen rejects that view. This simplest of words can be used for dramatic effect. The living King or a dead King? The British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a paper in called On Denoting, all about the definite article. Russell put forward a theory of definite descriptions.