Which is correct: "__ is different from __" or "__ is different than __"?

As someone who learned English later on in life, I was taught that different from is the correct grammar to use: this is different from that. However, it seems these days everyone uses different than instead. I know it's incorrect usage, but does the language evolve if the majority wins?

Edit: Some commented different than is American English and different from is British English, both are OK. IMO, this isn't like color versus colour, though.

Than is used after a comparative adjective, e.g. taller than, whiter than. The word different isn't a comparative adjective, unless used in more different than. Logically, it makes no sense to say different than.

Solution 1:

You left out the construction that makes the question more interesting: different to.

The quick answer is that "different from" is always correct and acceptable everywhere, but "different than" is common in US usage (as odd as it may seem for two things to be both different than the other), and "different to" is common in UK usage (as odd as it may seem to have both "different from" and "different to" mean the same thing).

Here's the useful alt.usage.english FAQ entry in its entirety:

"Different from" is the construction that no one will object to. "Different to" is fairly common informally in the U.K., but rare in the U.S. "Different than" is sometimes used to avoid the cumbersome "different from that which", etc. (e.g., "a very different Pamela than I used to leave all company and pleasure for" -- Samuel Richardson). Some U.S. speakers use "different than" exclusively. Some people have insisted on "different from" on the grounds that "from" is required after "to differ". But Fowler points out that there are many other adjectives that do not conform to the construction of their parent verbs (e.g., "accords with", but "according to"; "derogates from", but "derogatory to").

The Collins Cobuild Bank of English shows choice of preposition after "different" to be distributed as follows:

                "from"  "to"    "than"
                -----   ----    ------
U.K. writing    87.6    10.8     1.5
U.K. speech     68.8    27.3     3.9
U.S. writing    92.7     0.3     7.0
U.S. speech     69.3     0.6    30.1

So it's safest to avoid both "different to" and "different than", even though they have ≈30% popularity in UK and US speech respectively, and use "different from" exclusively. See also Michael Quinion's World Wide Words where he points out that many good writers have used the much-maligned now-grudgingly-accepted "than".

Solution 2:

If you look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), you will find that different than, despite objections to its being “illogical” and “incorrect”, is in fact a very common and therefore standard usage in American English.

                TOTAL  SPOKEN  FICTION  MAGAZINE  NEWSPAPER  ACADEMIC
 DIFFERENT FROM 
      raw count  12420   1970     1804      2469       1744      4433
    per million         22.61    22.07     28.33      20.88     53.46
 DIFFERENT THAN 
      raw count   3453   1726      367       358        624       378
    per million         19.81     4.49      4.11       7.47      4.56

Raw results page

From this we can see that, indeed, different from is more common than different than, but by a ratio of less than 4 to 1, meaning that different than enjoys substantial minority usage. Further dividing up the usage, we see that different than is almost as common as different from in spoken English (22.61 incidences per million words for different from versus 19.81 for different than), but much less common in written forms. When a usage is more common in spoken English, that is usually a sign that it is less formal.

For another perspective, let’s look at the historical development of different than using data from the Corpus of Historical American English:

COHA results page

Here we see that different than is a relatively new development in American English, only coming into any significant usage starting in the 1960s. It is probably this relative newness that makes usage commenters object to different than. But the rise of different than is probably inexorable, and the COCA data, which divides up incidences over the last 4 half-decades, shows that the ratio in favor of different from was 4.4 to 1 for 1990–1994, but had dropped to 2.9 to 1 by 2005–2010.

So, in conclusion, yes different from is more common than different than, and different than is less formal than different from, probably because it is a relatively recent development. However, different than occurs with significant frequency even in formal academic writing, so to write it off as simply “incorrect” is to ignore the facts. If current trends continue, different than and different from will be equally common within a few decades.

Solution 3:

Imagine modifications:

"to differ FROM" is ok

"to differ than" makes no sense.

Therefore, if you cannot differ than something, you also cannot be different than something. It's completely not like "greater than".