Don’t End a Sentence with a Preposition—Where Did This Myth Come From?
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
Don’t End a Sentence with a Preposition—Where Did This Myth Come From?
We’ve written a newsletter article about it (Problems with Prepositions), and in Rule 1 of Prepositions we state, “One of the undying myths of English grammar is that you may not end a sentence with a preposition.” Yet, we still receive admonitions from well-meaning readers who think we’ve made an error when ending a sentence with a preposition. Where did this myth originate, and how did it become such a prevalent belief?
Thanks to loyal reader Yvonne V. for alerting us to an excellent article that should put this myth to rest—for all who read it anyway.
Where the “No Ending a Sentence With a Preposition” Rule Comes From
It all goes back to 17th-century England and a fusspot named John Dryden.
by Dan Nosowitz
There are thousands of individual rules for proper grammatical use of any given language; mostly, these are created, and then taught, in order to maximize understanding and minimize confusion. But the English language prohibition against “preposition stranding”—ending a sentence with a preposition like with, at, or of—is not like this. It is a fantastically stupid rule that when followed often has the effect of mangling a sentence. And yet for hundreds of years, schoolchildren have been taught to create disastrously awkward sentences like “With whom did you go?”
The origins of this rule date back to one guy you may have heard of. Of whom you may have heard. Whatever. His name was John Dryden.
Born in 1631, John Dryden was the most important figure throughout the entire Restoration period of the late 17th century. He was more prolific, more popular, more successful, and more ambitious than any of the other writers of his era, and his era included John Milton. He was England’s first official poet laureate. He wrote dozens of plays, poems, works of satire, literary prose, and criticism. The best modern edition of the collected works of John Dryden took the University of California Press about 50 years to create, and runs to 20 gigantic volumes. He perfected the heroic couplet, making it a standard part of English poetry. He was the most important translator of classics into English for hundreds of years, possibly ever. He was, without a doubt, the guy in the London literary scene of the late 17th century, and that was a very important scene.
That said, Dryden was roundly mocked by his contemporaries. He does not seem to have been particularly well-liked. “There is more hostile response to Dryden than there is to any other early modern writer—I think than any other writer, period,” says Steven Zwicker, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who is one of the premier Dryden scholars in the world.
Dryden twice stated an opposition to preposition stranding. In an afterword for one of his own plays, he criticized Ben Jonson for doing this, saying: “The preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observed in my own writing.” Later, in a letter to a young writer who had asked for advice, he wrote: “In the correctness of the English I remember I hinted somewhat of concludding [sic] your sentences with prepositions or conjunctions sometimes, which is not elegant, as in your first sentence.”
Dryden does not state why he finds this to be “not elegant.” And yet somehow this completely unexplained, tiny criticism, buried in his mountain of works, lodged itself in the grammarian mind, and continued to be taught for hundreds of years later. This casual little comment would arguably be Dryden’s most enduring creation. It’s a little bit sad.
Following the death of Oliver Cromwell, England was in a pretty weird place, and the English language was in a weirder one. The monarchy had been restored, but during Cromwell’s reign an awful lot of English writing had been stunted; for a time, plays were even banned, for fear of public political criticism. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, because during the latter half of the 17th century, literacy rates in London—by far the highest in the country—were only around 20 percent. The language evolved on the stage, and that development was paused for a few decades.
At the time, there were at most a handful of what are called English grammars: basically, books instructing the proper way to use the English language. In the Restoration period, when Dryden was a star, the discussion of exactly what the English language was (and, in turn, who the English people were, and what England was) began to really rapidly evolve. Dryden is not very well-known today, but at the time he was the leading literary rockstar, and his words carried a huge amount of weight. He wasn’t really one of the leading grammarians of his time, being focused more on his plays and criticism, but he did, says Zwicker, have very firm opinions about what he considered good writing and what he considered bad writing.
Other writers of the time were hostile to Dryden, attacking him for changing his religion from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism, his political affiliation, for his ambition, and, it seems, because he was sort of a boring and witless conversationalist. You might expect that the guy to ban preposition stranding would be a pithy Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde type, full of great barbed quotes. But Dryden wasn’t that at all. “No one admired him for his verbal wit,” says Zwicker. “Certainly his writing is wonderful and clever, but he had practically no verbal presence at all.”
It is actually a bit of a mystery why he was so loathed at the time; Zwicker suggests some of it was probably envy at Dryden’s success, some was legitimate criticism of his style, and some was vague personality stuff. But a lot of this stuff seems like subtext, as if Dryden was attacked because he was Dryden and the reasons given might not have been telling the full story.
Dryden loved the classics; he was easily the most prominent translator and critic of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, although his translations (like a lot of his own writing) were sort of bombastic and larger-than-life. He was fluent in Latin and worshipped the classics. And English was in a place where it was about to accelerate; it had been paused and now it was un-paused. Dryden’s ideas about what English should be were heavily motivated by Latin and Latinate ideas. It’s believed this is where his preposition thing comes from; in Latin, the preposition, as indicated by the first three letters of the word “preposition,” always comes before the noun. It is assumed that this is what motivated Dryden to make this case.
This is kind of a paradox as well; Dryden worshipped the classics, and was motivated by classical Latin, but was a defiant modernist, maybe even a progressive. He critiqued Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, applauded the newer writers of his own era, invented new forms which he then sought to popularize. But that’s the hold that the classics have: even when you’re trying to push things forward, the classics are always there.
What’s so frustrating about this whole preposition thing is that there doesn’t appear to be an easy answer as to how it became so completely lodged in formal English grammar. There are all these little hints as to why it might have taken hold—it is an easy-to-understand grammarian rule that came about at a time and place when English grammar was rapidly taking form, and it came from the mouth of the biggest literary figure of the time. But like Dryden himself, it’s a hard rule to get ahold of. Of which to get ahold.
If the article or the existing discussions do not address a thought or question you have on the subject, please use the "Comment" box at the bottom of this page.
When corrected for ending a sentence with a preposition, Winston Churchill is said to have changed the sentence to read “That is something up with which I will not put” and then called his critic an ass and told him or her to get out of his office and never return. I assume Mr. Churchill then went back to his original sentence.
There are a number of versions of this story citing various contexts (such as responding to an editor or a government official) and various wordings, including: “This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
The earliest known example of the anecdote appeared in 1942. It was first attributed to Winston Churchill in 1944. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/
I see absolutely no harm in breaking this rule as long as the meaning is clear. English language, though very rich and beautiful, can be very awkward at times. Then there are conflicting views on almost anything controversial. Even your dictionaries differ on several matters.
We aren’t breaking rules that don’t exist. As we state in Problems with Prepositions and in Rule 1 of Prepositions, the only real rule is “do not use extra prepositions when the meaning is clear without them.”
To me, as a non-native English speaker from Russia who studied English at the faculty of foreign languages at university, this “rule” against preposition stranding sounds totally surprising and weird. It was only a few years ago that I heard about all the fuss existing around it in the English-speaking world. None of our English teachers or textbooks ever mentioned such a thing – not even as a funny fact we should know of; ending sentences with prepositions has always felt just normal and natural. The same goes for the split infitinive, by the way.
I think the mention of MYTH in your title in overly suggestive. The fact that grammarians have taught and employed this for centuries is telling. If this rule were indeed a myth, do you think that not a single grammarian or English professor in centuries would have realized it?
We are using the word myth in the sense of “a widely held but false belief or idea.” The point is that it is not a rule that absolutely must be followed to the exclusion of any other approach, but rather a guideline that one may choose to follow. Some may prefer to say or write “To whom am I speaking?” and others may choose “Whom am I speaking to?” Either is correct grammar.
Wow. “With whom did you go?” Sounds perfect to me. This sounded more like a defamation of Dryden than a logical argument against not ending a sentence with a preposition. I think you might have been better off quoting Churchill…
Writing “With whom did you go?” is perfectly fine. We don’t feel that the article in the newsletter is arguing against the “rule” of not ending a sentence with a preposition. It’s just saying that sometimes it doesn’t matter, and that some sentences would benefit from leaving the preposition at the end. The quote from Churchill that you mention, which goes something like, “This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put,” is such an example. A sentence such as “That’s something I won’t put up with” is more straightforward and is correct grammar as well.
“This is the sort of arrant pedantry I will not tolerate.” … Rewording often avoids both
preposition stranding (which I agree is inelegant) and awkwardness.
The concern that preposition stranding is inelegant or awkward is sometimes derived from being told repeatedly that it’s a grammatical error to do so.
At its best, American TV writing is excellent, it’s erudite and literary. But it’s obvious that they are self-consciously trying to follow the fake “no preposition at the end of a sentence” rule. But there’s no escaping sentences like “He picked it up,” “He took it out,” there’s just no other way of saying it. English is descended from a Germanic language where prepositions and other particles routinely go to the end. The Germanic languages are descended from proto-Indo-European which had many mobile and separable elements. It’s in our language and the history of our language.
My girl recently said “Can you hang this somewhere up?” I loved it! Who’s to say that this is non-grammatical? A non-preposition at the end person would have to say, “Can you hang up this somewhere?” This is clearly ridiculous. A normal person would say “Can you hang this up somewhere?” The way my girl said it demonstrates that separation is alive and productive in English. The “no preposition at the end of a sentence” rule is fake!
We agree that avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence at all costs is rigid adherence to an archaic grammatical principle. The types of separation you are referring to involve verb particles, which similarly can include separation and movement in a sentence. If the subject of ending a sentence in a preposition interests you further, you might also enjoy our post Ending a Sentence in a Preposition.