One of the downsides to being the child of an editor is that your grammar is often corrected. A common correction I make is my children’s use of the word “much”.
Here are some examples that show you how my children (especially the younger ones) use “much”:
- There were much kittens at the pet store.
- There were much cookies in the cookie jar.
- There were much leaves in the yard.
In all these cases, the word should be “many”.
“Many” modifies things that we can count (kittens, cookies, leaves), and “much” modifies things that we can’t count (water, oxygen, fire). The distinction between much and many is similar to the difference between less and fewer.
In my examples, we’d simply rewrite them as:
- There were many kittens at the pet store.
- There were many cookies in the cookie jar.
- There were many leaves in the yard.
Are there words that confuse you? Let me know in the comments below, and I will explain the difference.