CRED Practical Document Writing and Management

Less v. fewer - exceptions

It is always incorrect to refer to less people ● People are individuals and come in numbers, not in amounts. When discussing money and time, and numerical amounts of quantity, it is usual to use “less than” ● For example, “The tablet blend weighed less than 7 kg.” or “I have less than an hour to prepare these samples.” This is because we are referring to the magnitude of the measured quantity (7 kg, an hour) rather than a count of individual units ● So, we say less than 7 kg, not fewer than 7 kg, because we are not referring to seven individual kilograms, but to a single amount of tablet blend that happens to weigh 7 kg.