Hello all!

It’s that time again! Today’s tricky word pair is then and than. These two have a tendency to trip people up because their spellings are so similar, which winds up leading many writers out there to use one or the other exclusively, regardless of the sentence situation. In fact, my theory is that a whole lot of people don’t realize there actually are two words. But after reading this, you will no longer fall into that category of authors!

Then can be an adverb, a noun, or an adjective depending on how it is used. As an adverb, it presents a sequence of events: She cleaned the counter, then the sink. As a noun, it refers to a period of time: Things were better back then. And as an adjective, it describes the former state of something: The then-leader of the writing group forgot the difference between “then” and “than,” much to everybody’s chagrin. By contrast, than is only ever a conjunction, used to set up a comparison: I like the French restaurant much better than the Italian one.

The real trick to remembering when to use then and when to use than is to simply remember that both words exist. Then, use than when you’re setting up a comparison and use then the rest of the time. And then you’ll find your writing much clearer than before!

Until next time!